(2 min) In this paper, we focus on a new method of data augmentation to solve the data imbalance problem within imbalanced ECG datasets to improve the robustness and accuracy of heart disease detection. By using Optimal Transport, we augment the ECG disease data from normal ECG beats to balance the data among different categories. We build a Multi-Feature Transformer (MF-Transformer) as our classification model, where different features are extracted from both time and frequency domains to diagnose various heart conditions. Learning from 12-lead ECG signals, our model is able to distinguish five categories of cardiac conditions. Our results demonstrate 1) the classification models' ability to make competitive predictions on five ECG categories; 2) improvements in accuracy and robustness reflecting the effectiveness of our data augmentation method.

(2 min) Estimating personalized treatment effects from high-dimensional observational data is essential in situations where experimental designs are infeasible, unethical, or expensive. Existing approaches rely on fitting deep models on outcomes observed for treated and control populations. However, when measuring individual outcomes is costly, as is the case of a tumor biopsy, a sample-efficient strategy for acquiring each result is required. Deep Bayesian active learning provides a framework for efficient data acquisition by selecting points with high uncertainty. However, existing methods bias training data acquisition towards regions of non-overlapping support between the treated and control populations. These are not sample-efficient because the treatment effect is not identifiable in such regions. We introduce causal, Bayesian acquisition functions grounded in information theory that bias data acquisition towards regions with overlapping support to maximize sample efficiency for learning personalized treatment effects. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed acquisition strategies on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets IHDP and CMNIST and their extensions, which aim to simulate common dataset biases and pathologies.

(2 min) Computational methods for predicting the interface contacts between proteins come highly sought after for drug discovery as they can significantly advance the accuracy of alternative approaches, such as protein-protein docking, protein function analysis tools, and other computational methods for protein bioinformatics. In this work, we present the Geometric Transformer, a novel geometry-evolving graph transformer for rotation and translation-invariant protein interface contact prediction, packaged within DeepInteract, an end-to-end prediction pipeline. DeepInteract predicts partner-specific protein interface contacts (i.e., inter-protein residue-residue contacts) given the 3D tertiary structures of two proteins as input. In rigorous benchmarks, DeepInteract, on challenging protein complex targets from the 13th and 14th CASP-CAPRI experiments as well as Docking Benchmark 5, achieves 14% and 1.1% top L/5 precision (L: length of a protein unit in a complex), respectively. In doing so, DeepInteract, with the Geometric Transformer as its graph-based backbone, outperforms existing methods for interface contact prediction in addition to other graph-based neural network backbones compatible with DeepInteract, thereby validating the effectiveness of the Geometric Transformer for learning rich relational-geometric features for downstream tasks on 3D protein structures.

(2 min) Continuous long-term monitoring of electrocardiography (ECG) signals is crucial for the early detection of cardiac abnormalities such as arrhythmia. Non-clinical ECG recordings acquired by Holter and wearable ECG sensors often suffer from severe artifacts such as baseline wander, signal cuts, motion artifacts, variations on QRS amplitude, noise, and other interferences. Usually, a set of such artifacts occur on the same ECG signal with varying severity and duration, and this makes an accurate diagnosis by machines or medical doctors extremely difficult. Despite numerous studies that have attempted ECG denoising, they naturally fail to restore the actual ECG signal corrupted with such artifacts due to their simple and naive noise model. In this study, we propose a novel approach for blind ECG restoration using cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (Cycle-GANs) where the quality of the signal can be improved to a clinical level ECG regardless of the type and severity of the artifacts corrupting the signal. To further boost the restoration performance, we propose 1D operational Cycle-GANs with the generative neuron model. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively using one of the largest benchmark ECG datasets from the China Physiological Signal Challenge (CPSC-2020) with more than one million beats. Besides the quantitative and qualitative evaluations, a group of cardiologists performed medical evaluations to validate the quality and usability of the restored ECG, especially for an accurate arrhythmia diagnosis.

(2 min) We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from high-dimensional, observational data with unobserved confounders. Unobserved confounders introduce ignorance -- a level of unidentifiability -- about an individual's response to treatment by inducing bias in CATE estimates. We present a new parametric interval estimator suited for high-dimensional data, that estimates a range of possible CATE values when given a predefined bound on the level of hidden confounding. Further, previous interval estimators do not account for ignorance about the CATE associated with samples that may be underrepresented in the original study, or samples that violate the overlap assumption. Our interval estimator also incorporates model uncertainty so that practitioners can be made aware of out-of-distribution data. We prove that our estimator converges to tight bounds on CATE when there may be unobserved confounding, and assess it using semi-synthetic, high-dimensional datasets.

(0 min) Anisotropic diffusion filtering for signal smoothing as a low-pass filter has the advantage of the edge-preserving, i.e., it does not affect the edges that contain more critical data than the other parts of the signal. In this paper, we present a numerical algorithm based on least squares support vector regression by using Legendre orthogonal kernel with the discretization of the nonlinear diffusion problem in time by the Crank-Nicolson method. This method transforms the signal smoothing process into solving an optimization problem that can be solved by efficient numerical algorithms. In the final analysis, we have reported some numerical experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed machine learning based approach for signal smoothing.

(0 min) Daily life of thousands of individuals around the globe suffers due to physical or mental disability related to limb movement. The quality of life for such individuals can be made better by use of assistive applications and systems. In such scenario, mapping of physical actions from movement to a computer aided application can lead the way for solution. Surface Electromyography (sEMG) presents a non-invasive mechanism through which we can translate the physical movement to signals for classification and use in applications. In this paper, we propose a machine learning based framework for classification of 4 physical actions. The framework looks into the various features from different modalities which contribution from time domain, frequency domain, higher order statistics and inter channel statistics. Next, we conducted a comparative analysis of k-NN, SVM and ELM classifier using the feature set. Effect of different combinations of feature set has also been recorded. Finally, the classifier accuracy with SVM and 1-NN based classifier for a subset of features gives an accuracy of 95.21 and 95.83 respectively. Additionally, we have also proposed that dimensionality reduction by use of PCA leads to only a minor drop of less than 5.55% in accuracy while using only 9.22% of the original feature set. These finding are useful for algorithm designer to choose the best approach keeping in mind the resources available for execution of algorithm.

(0 min) Policy optimization is a fundamental principle for designing reinforcement learning algorithms, and one example is the proximal policy optimization algorithm with a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-clip), which has been popularly used in deep reinforcement learning due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Despite its superior empirical performance, PPO-clip has not been justified via theoretical proof up to date. This paper proposes to rethink policy optimization and reinterpret the theory of PPO-clip based on hinge policy optimization (HPO), called to improve policy by hinge loss in this paper. Specifically, we leverage sufficient conditions of state-wise policy improvement and then rethink policy update as solving a large-margin classification problem with hinge loss. By leveraging various types of classifiers, the proposed design opens up a whole new family of policy-based algorithms, including the PPO-clip as a special case. Based on this construct, we prove that these algorithms asymptotically attain a globally optimal policy. To our knowledge, this is the first ever that can prove global convergence to an optimal policy for a variant of PPO-clip. Through experiments, we corroborate the performance of a variety of HPO algorithms against popular benchmark methods.

(0 min) We develop biologically plausible training mechanisms for self-supervised learning (SSL) in deep networks. Specifically, by biological plausible training we mean (i) All updates of weights are based on current activities of pre-synaptic units and current, or activity retrieved from short term memory of post synaptic units, including at the top-most error computing layer, (ii) Complex computations such as normalization, inner products and division are avoided (iii) Asymmetric connections between units, (iv) Most learning is carried out in an unsupervised manner. SSL with a contrastive loss satisfies the third condition as it does not require labelled data and it introduces robustness to observed perturbations of objects, which occur naturally as objects or observer move in 3d and with variable lighting over time. We propose a contrastive hinge based loss whose error involves simple local computations satisfying (ii), as opposed to the standard contrastive losses employed in the literature, which do not lend themselves easily to implementation in a network architecture due to complex computations involving ratios and inner products. Furthermore we show that learning can be performed with one of two more plausible alternatives to backpropagation that satisfy conditions (i) and (ii). The first is difference target propagation (DTP) and the second is layer-wise learning (LL), where each layer is directly connected to a layer computing the loss error. Both methods represent alternatives to the symmetric weight issue of backpropagation. By training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with SSL and DTP, LL, we find that our proposed framework achieves comparable performance to standard BP learning downstream linear classifier evaluation of the learned embeddings.

(0 min) Learning effective visual representations without human supervision is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Recent advances in self-supervised learning algorithms have utilized contrastive learning, with methods such as SimCLR, which applies a composition of augmentations to an image, and minimizes a contrastive loss between the two augmented images. In this paper, we present CLAWS, an annotation-efficient learning framework, addressing the problem of manually labeling large-scale agricultural datasets along with potential applications such as anomaly detection and plant growth analytics. CLAWS uses a network backbone inspired by SimCLR and weak supervision to investigate the effect of contrastive learning within class clusters. In addition, we inject a hard attention mask to the cropped input image before maximizing agreement between the image pairs using a contrastive loss function. This mask forces the network to focus on pertinent object features and ignore background features. We compare results between a supervised SimCLR and CLAWS using an agricultural dataset with 227,060 samples consisting of 11 different crop classes. Our experiments and extensive evaluations show that CLAWS achieves a competitive NMI score of 0.7325. Furthermore, CLAWS engenders the creation of low dimensional representations of very large datasets with minimal parameter tuning and forming well-defined clusters, which lends themselves to using efficient, transparent, and highly interpretable clustering methods such as Gaussian Mixture Models.

(0 min) Free-hand sketches are highly illustrative, and have been widely used by humans to depict objects or stories from ancient times to the present. The recent prevalence of touchscreen devices has made sketch creation a much easier task than ever and consequently made sketch-oriented applications increasingly popular. The progress of deep learning has immensely benefited free-hand sketch research and applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the deep learning techniques oriented at free-hand sketch data, and the applications that they enable. The main contents of this survey include: (i) A discussion of the intrinsic traits and unique challenges of free-hand sketch, to highlight the essential differences between sketch data and other data modalities, e.g., natural photos. (ii) A review of the developments of free-hand sketch research in the deep learning era, by surveying existing datasets, research topics, and the state-of-the-art methods through a detailed taxonomy and experimental evaluation. (iii) Promotion of future work via a discussion of bottlenecks, open problems, and potential research directions for the community.

(0 min) Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) is widely used to analyze overparametrized neural networks due to the famous result by (Jacot et al., 2018): in the infinite-width limit, the NTK is deterministic and constant during training. However, this result cannot explain the behavior of deep networks, since it generally does not hold if depth and width tend to infinity simultaneously. In this paper, we study the NTK of fully-connected ReLU networks with depth comparable to width. We prove that the NTK properties depend significantly on the depth-to-width ratio and the distribution of parameters at initialization. In fact, our results indicate the importance of the three phases in the hyperparameter space identified in (Poole et al., 2016): ordered, chaotic and the edge of chaos (EOC). We derive exact expressions for the NTK dispersion in the infinite-depth-and-width limit in all three phases and conclude that the NTK variability grows exponentially with depth at the EOC and in the chaotic phase but not in the ordered phase. We also show that the NTK of deep networks may stay constant during training only in the ordered phase and discuss how the structure of the NTK matrix changes during training.

(0 min) The most effective of the solutions against Covid-19 is the various vaccines developed. Distrust of vaccines can hinder the rapid and effective use of this remedy. One of the means of expressing the thoughts of society is social media. Determining the time intervals during which anti-vaccination increases in social media can help institutions determine the strategy to be used in combating anti-vaccination. Recording and tracking every tweet entered with human labor would be inefficient, so various automation solutions are needed. In this study, The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, which is a deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) model, was used. In a dataset of 1506 tweets divided into four different categories as news, irrelevant, anti-vaccine, and vaccine supporters, the model was trained with a learning rate of 5e-6 for 25 epochs. To determine the intervals in which anti-vaccine tweets are concentrated, the categories to which 652840 tweets belong were determined by using the trained model. The change of the determined categories overtime was visualized and the events that could cause the change were determined. As a result of model training, in the test dataset, the f-score of 0.81 and AUC values for different classes were obtained as 0.99,0.91, 0.92, 0.92, respectively. In this model, unlike the studies in the literature, an auxiliary system is designed that provides data that institutions can use when determining their strategy by measuring and visualizing the frequency of anti-vaccine tweets in a time interval, different from detecting and censoring such tweets.

(0 min) The prediction for information diffusion on social networks has great practical significance in marketing and public opinion control. It aims to predict the individuals who will potentially repost the message on the social network. One type of method is based on demographics, complex networks and other prior knowledge to establish an interpretable model to simulate and predict the propagation process, while the other type of method is completely data-driven and maps the nodes to a latent space for propagation prediction. Existing latent space design and embedding methods lack consideration for the intervene among users. In this paper, we propose an independent asymmetric embedding method to embed each individual into one latent influence space and multiple latent susceptibility spaces. Based on the similarity between information diffusion and heat diffusion phenomenon, the heat diffusion kernel is exploited in our model and establishes the embedding rules. Furthermore, our method captures the co-occurrence regulation of user combinations in cascades to improve the calculating effectiveness. The results of extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets verify both the predictive accuracy and cost-effectiveness of our approach.

(0 min) A Java parallel streams implementation of the $K$-nearest neighbor descent algorithm is presented using a natural statistical termination criterion. Input data consist of a set $S$ of $n$ objects of type V, and a Function>, which enables any $x \in S$ to decide which of $y, z \in S\setminus\{x\}$ is more similar to $x$. Experiments with the Kullback-Leibler divergence Comparator support the prediction that the number of rounds of $K$-nearest neighbor updates need not exceed twice the diameter of the undirected version of a random regular out-degree $K$ digraph on $n$ vertices. Overall complexity was $O(n K^2 \log_K(n))$ in the class of examples studied. When objects are sampled uniformly from a $d$-dimensional simplex, accuracy of the $K$-nearest neighbor approximation is high up to $d = 20$, but declines in higher dimensions, as theory would predict.

(0 min) Normalizing Flows (NFs) are universal density estimators based on Neural Networks. However, this universality is limited: the density's support needs to be diffeomorphic to a Euclidean space. In this paper, we propose a novel method to overcome this limitation without sacrificing universality. The proposed method inflates the data manifold by adding noise in the normal space, trains an NF on this inflated manifold, and, finally, deflates the learned density. Our main result provides sufficient conditions on the manifold and the specific choice of noise under which the corresponding estimator is exact. Our method has the same computational complexity as NFs and does not require computing an inverse flow. We also show that, if the embedding dimension is much larger than the manifold dimension, noise in the normal space can be well approximated by Gaussian noise. This allows using our method for approximating arbitrary densities on unknown manifolds provided that the manifold dimension is known.

(0 min) Secure model aggregation is a key component of federated learning (FL) that aims at protecting the privacy of each user's individual model while allowing for their global aggregation. It can be applied to any aggregation-based FL approach for training a global or personalized model. Model aggregation needs to also be resilient against likely user dropouts in FL systems, making its design substantially more complex. State-of-the-art secure aggregation protocols rely on secret sharing of the random-seeds used for mask generations at the users to enable the reconstruction and cancellation of those belonging to the dropped users. The complexity of such approaches, however, grows substantially with the number of dropped users. We propose a new approach, named LightSecAgg, to overcome this bottleneck by changing the design from "random-seed reconstruction of the dropped users" to "one-shot aggregate-mask reconstruction of the active users via mask encoding/decoding". We show that LightSecAgg achieves the same privacy and dropout-resiliency guarantees as the state-of-the-art protocols while significantly reducing the overhead for resiliency against dropped users. We also demonstrate that, unlike existing schemes, LightSecAgg can be applied to secure aggregation in the asynchronous FL setting. Furthermore, we provide a modular system design and optimized on-device parallelization for scalable implementation, by enabling computational overlapping between model training and on-device encoding, as well as improving the speed of concurrent receiving and sending of chunked masks. We evaluate LightSecAgg via extensive experiments for training diverse models on various datasets in a realistic FL system with large number of users and demonstrate that LightSecAgg significantly reduces the total training time.

(0 min) Our goal is to develop theory and algorithms for establishing fundamental limits on performance for a given task imposed by a robot's sensors. In order to achieve this, we define a quantity that captures the amount of task-relevant information provided by a sensor. Using a novel version of the generalized Fano inequality from information theory, we demonstrate that this quantity provides an upper bound on the highest achievable expected reward for one-step decision making tasks. We then extend this bound to multi-step problems via a dynamic programming approach. We present algorithms for numerically computing the resulting bounds, and demonstrate our approach on three examples: (i) the lava problem from the literature on partially observable Markov decision processes, (ii) an example with continuous state and observation spaces corresponding to a robot catching a freely-falling object, and (iii) obstacle avoidance using a depth sensor with non-Gaussian noise. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to establish strong limits on achievable performance for these problems by comparing our upper bounds with achievable lower bounds (computed by synthesizing or learning concrete control policies).

(0 min) Interactions between pieces of information (entities) play a substantial role in the way an individual acts on them: adoption of a product, the spread of news, strategy choice, etc. However, the underlying interaction mechanisms are often unknown and have been little explored in the literature. We introduce an efficient method to infer both the entities interaction network and its evolution according to the temporal distance separating interacting entities; together, they form the interaction profile. The interaction profile allows characterizing the mechanisms of the interaction processes. We approach this problem via a convex model based on recent advances in multi-kernel inference. We consider an ordered sequence of exposures to entities (URL, ads, situations) and the actions the user exerts on them (share, click, decision). We study how users exhibit different behaviors according to combinations of exposures they have been exposed to. We show that the effect of a combination of exposures on a user is more than the sum of each exposure's independent effect--there is an interaction. We reduce this modeling to a non-parametric convex optimization problem that can be solved in parallel. Our method recovers state-of-the-art results on interaction processes on three real-world datasets and outperforms baselines in the inference of the underlying data generation mechanisms. Finally, we show that interaction profiles can be visualized intuitively, easing the interpretation of the model.

(0 min) Machine learning has the potential to automate molecular design and drastically accelerate the discovery of new functional compounds. Towards this goal, generative models and reinforcement learning (RL) using string and graph representations have been successfully used to search for novel molecules. However, these approaches are limited since their representations ignore the three-dimensional (3D) structure of molecules. In fact, geometry plays an important role in many applications in inverse molecular design, especially in drug discovery. Thus, it is important to build models that can generate molecular structures in 3D space based on property-oriented geometric constraints. To address this, one approach is to generate molecules as 3D point clouds by sequentially placing atoms at locations in space -- this allows the process to be guided by physical quantities such as energy or other properties. However, this approach is inefficient as placing individual atoms makes the exploration unnecessarily deep, limiting the complexity of molecules that can be generated. Moreover, when optimizing a molecule, organic and medicinal chemists use known fragments and functional groups, not single atoms. We introduce a novel RL framework for scalable 3D design that uses a hierarchical agent to build molecules by placing molecular substructures sequentially in 3D space, thus attempting to build on the existing human knowledge in the field of molecular design. In a variety of experiments with different substructures, we show that our agent, guided only by energy considerations, can efficiently learn to produce molecules with over 100 atoms from many distributions including drug-like molecules, organic LED molecules, and biomolecules.

(0 min) Applying tree-based embedded feature selection to exclude irrelevant features in high-dimensional data with very small sample sizes requires optimized hyperparameters for the model building process. In addition, nested cross-validation must be applied for this type of data to avoid biased model performance. The resulting long computation time can be accelerated with pruning. However, standard pruning algorithms must prune late or risk aborting calculations of promising hyperparameter sets due to high variance in the performance evaluation metric. To address this, we adapt the usage of a state-of-the-art successive halving pruner and combine it with two new pruning strategies based on domain or prior knowledge. One additional pruning strategy immediately stops the computation of trials with semantically meaningless results for the selected hyperparameter combinations. The other is an extrapolating threshold pruning strategy suitable for nested-cross-validation with high variance. Our proposed combined three-layer pruner keeps promising trials while reducing the number of models to be built by up to 81,3% compared to using a state-of-the-art asynchronous successive halving pruner alone. Our three-layer pruner implementation(available at https://github.com/sigrun-may/cv-pruner) speeds up data analysis or enables deeper hyperparameter search within the same computation time. It consequently saves time, money and energy, reducing the CO2 footprint.

(0 min) The relatedness between an economic actor (for instance a country, or a firm) and a product is a measure of the feasibility of that economic activity. As such, it is a driver for investments both at a private and institutional level. Traditionally, relatedness is measured using complex networks approaches derived by country-level co-occurrences. In this work, we compare complex networks and machine learning algorithms trained on both country and firm-level data. In order to quantitatively compare the different measures of relatedness, we use them to predict the future exports at country and firm-level, assuming that more related products have higher likelihood to be exported in the near future. Our results show that relatedness is scale-dependent: the best assessments are obtained by using machine learning on the same typology of data one wants to predict. Moreover, while relatedness measures based on country data are not suitable for firms, firm-level data are quite informative also to predict the development of countries. In this sense, models built on firm data provide a better assessment of relatedness with respect to country-level data. We also discuss the effect of using community detection algorithms and parameter optimization, finding that a partition into a higher number of blocks decreases the computational time while maintaining a prediction performance that is well above the network based benchmarks.

(0 min) Shuffle model of differential privacy is a novel distributed privacy model based on a combination of local privacy mechanisms and a secure shuffler. It has been shown that the additional randomisation provided by the shuffler improves privacy bounds compared to the purely local mechanisms. Accounting tight bounds, however, is complicated by the complexity brought by the shuffler. The recently proposed numerical techniques for evaluating $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy guarantees have been shown to give tighter bounds than commonly used methods for compositions of various complex mechanisms. In this paper, we show how to obtain accurate bounds for adaptive compositions of general $\varepsilon$-LDP shufflers using the analysis by Feldman et al. (2021) and tight bounds for adaptive compositions of shufflers of $k$-randomised response mechanisms, using the analysis by Balle et al. (2019). We show how to speed up the evaluation of the resulting privacy loss distribution from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n)$, where $n$ is the number of users, without noticeable change in the resulting $\delta(\varepsilon)$-upper bounds. We also demonstrate looseness of the existing bounds and methods found in the literature, improving previous composition results significantly.

(0 min) Posterior predictive distributions quantify uncertainties ignored by point estimates. This paper introduces The Neural Testbed: an opensource library for controlled and principled evaluation of agents that generate such predictions. Crucially, agents are assessed not only on the quality of their marginal predictions per input, but also on their joint predictions across many inputs. We evaluate a range of agents using a neural-network-based data generating process. Our results indicate that some well-known agents that produce accurate marginal predictions do not fare well with joint predictions. We show that the quality of joint predictions drives performance in downstream decision tasks, and highlight the importance of this observation to the community.

(0 min) Optimization is a ubiquitous modeling tool that is often deployed in settings that repeatedly solve similar instances of the same problem. Amortized optimization methods use learning to predict the solutions to problems in these settings. This leverages the shared structure between similar problem instances. In this tutorial, we will discuss the key design choices behind amortized optimization, roughly categorizing 1) models into fully-amortized and semi-amortized approaches, and 2) learning methods into regression-based and objective-based. We then view existing applications through these foundations to draw connections between them, including for manifold optimization, variational inference, sparse coding, meta-learning, control, reinforcement learning, convex optimization, and deep equilibrium networks. This framing enables us easily see, for example, that the amortized inference in variational autoencoders is conceptually identical to value gradients in control and reinforcement learning as they both use fully-amortized models with a objective-based loss. The source code for this tutorial is available at https://www.github.com/facebookresearch/amortized-optimization-tutorial

(0 min) We consider feature representation learning problem of molecular graphs. Graph Neural Networks have been widely used in feature representation learning of molecular graphs. However, most existing methods deal with molecular graphs individually while neglecting their connections, such as motif-level relationships. We propose a novel molecular graph representation learning method by constructing a heterogeneous motif graph to address this issue. In particular, we build a heterogeneous motif graph that contains motif nodes and molecular nodes. Each motif node corresponds to a motif extracted from molecules. Then, we propose a Heterogeneous Motif Graph Neural Network (HM-GNN) to learn feature representations for each node in the heterogeneous motif graph. Our heterogeneous motif graph also enables effective multi-task learning, especially for small molecular datasets. To address the potential efficiency issue, we propose to use an edge sampler, which can significantly reduce computational resources usage. The experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art models. Under multi-task settings, the promising performances of our methods on combined datasets shed light on a new learning paradigm for small molecular datasets. Finally, we show that our model achieves similar performances with significantly less computational resources by using our edge sampler.

(0 min) Properness for supervised losses stipulates that the loss function shapes the learning algorithm towards the true posterior of the data generating distribution. Unfortunately, data in modern machine learning can be corrupted or twisted in many ways. Hence, optimizing a proper loss function on twisted data could perilously lead the learning algorithm towards the twisted posterior, rather than to the desired clean posterior. Many papers cope with specific twists (e.g., label/feature/adversarial noise), but there is a growing need for a unified and actionable understanding atop properness. Our chief theoretical contribution is a generalization of the properness framework with a notion called twist-properness, which delineates loss functions with the ability to "untwist" the twisted posterior into the clean posterior. Notably, we show that a nontrivial extension of a loss function called $\alpha$-loss, which was first introduced in information theory, is twist-proper. We study the twist-proper $\alpha$-loss under a novel boosting algorithm, called PILBoost, and provide formal and experimental results for this algorithm. Our overarching practical conclusion is that the twist-proper $\alpha$-loss outperforms the proper $\log$-loss on several variants of twisted data.

(0 min) We study the problem of multi-agent control of a dynamical system with known dynamics and adversarial disturbances. Our study focuses on optimal control without centralized precomputed policies, but rather with adaptive control policies for the different agents that are only equipped with a stabilizing controller. We give a reduction from any (standard) regret minimizing control method to a distributed algorithm. The reduction guarantees that the resulting distributed algorithm has low regret relative to the optimal precomputed joint policy. Our methodology involves generalizing online convex optimization to a multi-agent setting and applying recent tools from nonstochastic control derived for a single agent. We empirically evaluate our method on a model of an overactuated aircraft. We show that the distributed method is robust to failure and to adversarial perturbations in the dynamics.

(0 min) Pauli spin blockade (PSB) can be employed as a great resource for spin qubit initialisation and readout even at elevated temperatures but it can be difficult to identify. We present a machine learning algorithm capable of automatically identifying PSB using charge transport measurements. The scarcity of PSB data is circumvented by training the algorithm with simulated data and by using cross-device validation. We demonstrate our approach on a silicon field-effect transistor device and report an accuracy of 96% on different test devices, giving evidence that the approach is robust to device variability. The approach is expected to be employable across all types of quantum dot devices.

(0 min) We address the problem of output prediction, ie. designing a model for autonomous nonlinear systems capable of forecasting their future observations. We first define a general framework bringing together the necessary properties for the development of such an output predictor. In particular, we look at this problem from two different viewpoints, control theory and data-driven techniques (machine learning), and try to formulate it in a consistent way, reducing the gap between the two fields. Building on this formulation and problem definition, we propose a predictor structure based on the Kazantzis-Kravaris/Luenberger (KKL) observer and we show that KKL fits well into our general framework. Finally, we propose a constructive solution for this predictor that solely relies on a small set of trajectories measured from the system. Our experiments show that our solution allows to obtain an efficient predictor over a subset of the observation space.

(0 min) Over-smoothing is a severe problem which limits the depth of Graph Convolutional Networks. This article gives a comprehensive analysis of the mechanism behind Graph Convolutional Networks and the over-smoothing effect. The article proposes an upper bound for the occurrence of over-smoothing, which offers insight into the key factors behind over-smoothing. The results presented in this article successfully explain the feasibility of several algorithms that alleviate over-smoothing.

(0 min) Nowadays there is a big spotlight cast on the development of techniques of explainable machine learning. Here we introduce a new computational paradigm based on Group Equivariant Non-Expansive Operators, that can be regarded as the product of a rising mathematical theory of information-processing observers. This approach, that can be adjusted to different situations, may have many advantages over other common tools, like Neural Networks, such as: knowledge injection and information engineering, selection of relevant features, small number of parameters and higher transparency. We chose to test our method, called GENEOnet, on a key problem in drug design: detecting pockets on the surface of proteins that can host ligands. Experimental results confirmed that our method works well even with a quite small training set, providing thus a great computational advantage, while the final comparison with other state-of-the-art methods shows that GENEOnet provides better or comparable results in terms of accuracy.

(0 min) Active learning aims to optimize the dataset annotation process when resources are constrained. Most existing methods are designed for balanced datasets. Their practical applicability is limited by the fact that a majority of real-life datasets are actually imbalanced. Here, we introduce a new active learning method which is designed for imbalanced datasets. It favors samples likely to be in minority classes so as to reduce the imbalance of the labeled subset and create a better representation for these classes. We also compare two training schemes for active learning: (1) the one commonly deployed in deep active learning using model fine tuning for each iteration and (2) a scheme which is inspired by transfer learning and exploits generic pre-trained models and train shallow classifiers for each iteration. Evaluation is run with three imbalanced datasets. Results show that the proposed active learning method outperforms competitive baselines. Equally interesting, they also indicate that the transfer learning training scheme outperforms model fine tuning if features are transferable from the generic dataset to the unlabeled one. This last result is surprising and should encourage the community to explore the design of deep active learning methods.

(0 min) Compensating scarce measurements by inferring them from computational models is a way to address ill-posed inverse problems. We tackle Limited Angle Tomography by completing the set of acquisitions using a generative model and prior-knowledge about the scanned object. Using a Generative Adversarial Network as model and Computer-Assisted Design data as shape prior, we demonstrate a quantitative and qualitative advantage of our technique over other state-of-the-art methods. Inferring a substantial number of consecutive missing measurements, we offer an alternative to other image inpainting techniques that fall short of providing a satisfying answer to our research question: can X-Ray exposition be reduced by using generative models to infer lacking measurements?

(0 min) We challenge a common assumption underlying most supervised deep learning: that a model makes a prediction depending only on its parameters and the features of a single input. To this end, we introduce a general-purpose deep learning architecture that takes as input the entire dataset instead of processing one datapoint at a time. Our approach uses self-attention to reason about relationships between datapoints explicitly, which can be seen as realizing non-parametric models using parametric attention mechanisms. However, unlike conventional non-parametric models, we let the model learn end-to-end from the data how to make use of other datapoints for prediction. Empirically, our models solve cross-datapoint lookup and complex reasoning tasks unsolvable by traditional deep learning models. We show highly competitive results on tabular data, early results on CIFAR-10, and give insight into how the model makes use of the interactions between points.

(0 min) What is the state of the art in continual machine learning? Although a natural question for predominant static benchmarks, the notion to train systems in a lifelong manner entails a plethora of additional challenges with respect to set-up and evaluation. The latter have recently sparked a growing amount of critiques on prominent algorithm-centric perspectives and evaluation protocols being too narrow, resulting in several attempts at constructing guidelines in favor of specific desiderata or arguing against the validity of prevalent assumptions. In this work, we depart from this mindset and argue that the goal of a precise formulation of desiderata is an ill-posed one, as diverse applications may always warrant distinct scenarios. Instead, we introduce the Continual Learning EValuation Assessment Compass: the CLEVA-Compass. The compass provides the visual means to both identify how approaches are practically reported and how works can simultaneously be contextualized in the broader literature landscape. In addition to promoting compact specification in the spirit of recent replication trends, it thus provides an intuitive chart to understand the priorities of individual systems, where they resemble each other, and what elements are missing towards a fair comparison.

(0 min) Federated learning (FL) has rapidly risen in popularity due to its promise of privacy and efficiency. Previous works have exposed privacy vulnerabilities in the FL pipeline by recovering user data from gradient updates. However, existing attacks fail to address realistic settings because they either 1) require a `toy' settings with very small batch sizes, or 2) require unrealistic and conspicuous architecture modifications. We introduce a new strategy that dramatically elevates existing attacks to operate on batches of arbitrarily large size, and without architectural modifications. Our model-agnostic strategy only requires modifications to the model parameters sent to the user, which is a realistic threat model in many scenarios. We demonstrate the strategy in challenging large-scale settings, obtaining high-fidelity data extraction in both cross-device and cross-silo federated learning.

(0 min) We propose the convergent graph solver (CGS), a deep learning method that learns iterative mappings to predict the properties of a graph system at its stationary state (fixed point) with guaranteed convergence. CGS systematically computes the fixed points of a target graph system and decodes them to estimate the stationary properties of the system without the prior knowledge of existing solvers or intermediate solutions. The forward propagation of CGS proceeds in three steps: (1) constructing the input dependent linear contracting iterative maps, (2) computing the fixed-points of the linear maps, and (3) decoding the fixed-points to estimate the properties. The contractivity of the constructed linear maps guarantees the existence and uniqueness of the fixed points following the Banach fixed point theorem. To train CGS efficiently, we also derive a tractable analytical expression for its gradient by leveraging the implicit function theorem. We evaluate the performance of CGS by applying it to various network-analytic and graph benchmark problems. The results indicate that CGS has competitive capabilities for predicting the stationary properties of graph systems, irrespective of whether the target systems are linear or non-linear. CGS also shows high performance for graph classification problems where the existence or the meaning of a fixed point is hard to be clearly defined, which highlights the potential of CGS as a general graph neural network architecture.

(0 min) We consider the explanation problem of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Most existing GNN explanation methods identify the most important edges or nodes but fail to consider substructures, which are more important for graph data. The only method that considers subgraphs tries to search all possible subgraphs and identify the most significant subgraphs. However, the subgraphs identified may not be recurrent or statistically important. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as MotifExplainer, to explain GNNs by identifying important motifs, recurrent and statistically significant patterns in graphs. Our proposed motif-based methods can provide better human-understandable explanations than methods based on nodes, edges, and regular subgraphs. Given an input graph and a pre-trained GNN model, our method first extracts motifs in the graph using well-designed motif extraction rules. Then we generate motif embedding by feeding motifs into the pre-trained GNN. Finally, we employ an attention-based method to identify the most influential motifs as explanations for the final prediction results. The empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

(0 min) In response to public scrutiny of data-driven algorithms, the field of data science has adopted ethics training and principles. Although ethics can help data scientists reflect on certain normative aspects of their work, such efforts are ill-equipped to generate a data science that avoids social harms and promotes social justice. In this article, I argue that data science must embrace a political orientation. Data scientists must recognize themselves as political actors engaged in normative constructions of society and evaluate their work according to its downstream impacts on people's lives. I first articulate why data scientists must recognize themselves as political actors. In this section, I respond to three arguments that data scientists commonly invoke when challenged to take political positions regarding their work. In confronting these arguments, I describe why attempting to remain apolitical is itself a political stance--a fundamentally conservative one--and why data science's attempts to promote "social good" dangerously rely on unarticulated and incrementalist political assumptions. I then propose a framework for how data science can evolve toward a deliberative and rigorous politics of social justice. I conceptualize the process of developing a politically engaged data science as a sequence of four stages. Pursuing these new approaches will empower data scientists with new methods for thoughtfully and rigorously contributing to social justice.

(0 min) Quantum technologies require methods for preparing and manipulating entangled multiparticle states. However, the problem of determining whether a given quantum state is entangled or separable is known to be an NP-hard problem in general, and even the task of detecting entanglement breakdown for a given class of quantum states is difficult. In this work, we develop an approach for revealing entanglement breakdown using a machine learning technique, which is known as 'learning by confusion'. We consider a family of quantum states, which is parameterized such that there is a single critical value dividing states within this family on separate and entangled. We demonstrate the 'learning by confusion' scheme allows determining the critical value. Specifically, we study the performance of the method for the two-qubit, two-qutrit, and two-ququart entangled state, where the standard entanglement measures do not work efficiently. In addition, we investigate the properties of the local depolarization and the generalized amplitude damping channel in the framework of the confusion scheme. Within our approach and setting the parameterization of special trajectories to construct W shapes, we obtain an entanglement-breakdown 'phase diagram' of a quantum channel, which indicates regions of entangled (separable) states and the entanglement-breakdown region. Then we extend the way of using the 'learning by confusion' scheme for recognizing whether an arbitrary given state is entangled or separable. We show that the developed method provides correct answers for a variety of states, including entangled states with positive partial transpose (PPT). We also present a more practical version of the method, which is suitable for studying entanglement breakdown in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We demonstrate its performance using an available cloud-based IBM quantum processor.

(0 min) Recommender systems typically suggest to users content similar to what they consumed in the past. If a user happens to be exposed to strongly polarized content, she might subsequently receive recommendations which may steer her towards more and more radicalized content, eventually being trapped in what we call a "radicalization pathway". In this paper, we study the problem of mitigating radicalization pathways using a graph-based approach. Specifically, we model the set of recommendations of a "what-to-watch-next" recommender as a d-regular directed graph where nodes correspond to content items, links to recommendations, and paths to possible user sessions. We measure the "segregation" score of a node representing radicalized content as the expected length of a random walk from that node to any node representing non-radicalized content. High segregation scores are associated to larger chances to get users trapped in radicalization pathways. Hence, we define the problem of reducing the prevalence of radicalization pathways by selecting a small number of edges to "rewire", so to minimize the maximum of segregation scores among all radicalized nodes, while maintaining the relevance of the recommendations. We prove that the problem of finding the optimal set of recommendations to rewire is NP-hard and NP-hard to approximate within any factor. Therefore, we turn our attention to heuristics, and propose an efficient yet effective greedy algorithm based on the absorbing random walk theory. Our experiments on real-world datasets in the context of video and news recommendations confirm the effectiveness of our proposal.

(0 min) In real-world federated learning scenarios, participants could have their own personalized labels which are incompatible with those from other clients, due to using different label permutations or tackling completely different tasks or domains. However, most existing FL approaches cannot effectively tackle such extremely heterogeneous scenarios since they often assume that (1) all participants use a synchronized set of labels, and (2) they train on the same task from the same domain. In this work, to tackle these challenges, we introduce Factorized-FL, which allows to effectively tackle label- and task-heterogeneous federated learning settings by factorizing the model parameters into a pair of vectors, where one captures the common knowledge across different labels and tasks and the other captures knowledge specific to the task each local model tackles. Moreover, based on the distance in the client-specific vector space, Factorized-FL performs selective aggregation scheme to utilize only the knowledge from the relevant participants for each client. We extensively validate our method on both label- and domain-heterogeneous settings, on which it outperforms the state-of-the-art personalized federated learning methods.

(0 min) For training neural networks, flat-minima optimizers that seek to find parameters in neighborhoods having uniformly low loss (flat minima) have been shown to improve upon stochastic and adaptive gradient-based methods. Two methods for finding flat minima stand out: 1. Averaging methods (i.e., Stochastic Weight Averaging, SWA), and 2. Minimax methods (i.e., Sharpness Aware Minimization, SAM). However, despite similar motivations, there has been limited investigation into their properties and no comprehensive comparison between them. In this work, we investigate the loss surfaces from a systematic benchmarking of these approaches across computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning tasks. This leads us to a hypothesis: since both approaches find flat solutions in orthogonal ways, combining them should improve generalization even further. We verify this improves over either flat-minima approach in 39 out of 42 cases. When it does not, we provide potential explanations. We hope our results across image, graph, and text data will help researchers to improve deep learning optimizers, and practitioners to pinpoint the optimizer for the problem at hand.

(0 min) Deep learning-based speech enhancement has shown unprecedented performance in recent years. The most popular mono speech enhancement frameworks are end-to-end networks mapping the noisy mixture into an estimate of the clean speech. With growing computational power and availability of multichannel microphone recordings, prior works have aimed to incorporate spatial statistics along with spectral information to boost up performance. Despite an improvement in enhancement performance of mono output, the spatial image preservation and subjective evaluations have not gained much attention in the literature. This paper proposes a novel stereo-aware framework for speech enhancement, i.e., a training loss for deep learning-based speech enhancement to preserve the spatial image while enhancing the stereo mixture. The proposed framework is model independent, hence it can be applied to any deep learning based architecture. We provide an extensive objective and subjective evaluation of the trained models through a listening test. We show that by regularizing for an image preservation loss, the overall performance is improved, and the stereo aspect of the speech is better preserved.

(0 min) Network Intrusion Detection Systems are well considered as efficient tools for securing in-vehicle networks against diverse cyberattacks. However, since cyberattack are always evolving, signature-based intrusion detection systems are no longer adopted. An alternative solution can be the deployment of deep learning based intrusion detection system (IDS) which play an important role in detecting unknown attack patterns in network traffic. To our knowledge, no previous research work has been done to detect anomalies on automotive ethernet based in-vehicle networks using anomaly based approaches. Hence, in this paper, we propose a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) for offline detection of anomalies on the Audio Video Transport Protocol (AVTP), an application layer protocol implemented in the recent in-vehicle network Automotive Ethernet. The CAE consists of an encoder and a decoder with CNN structures that are asymmetrical. Anomalies in AVTP packet stream, which may lead to critical interruption of media streams, are therefore detected by measuring the reconstruction error of each sliding window of AVTP packets. Our proposed approach is evaluated on the recently published "Automotive Ethernet Intrusion Dataset", and is also compared with other state-of-the art traditional anomaly detection and signature based models in machine learning. The numerical results show that our proposed model outperfoms the other methods and excel at predicting unknown in-vehicle intrusions, with 0.94 accuracy. Moreover, our model has a low level of false alarm and miss detection rates for different AVTP attack types.

(0 min) Deep learning approaches are successful in a wide range of AI problems and in particular for visual recognition tasks. However, there are still open problems among which is the capacity to handle streams of visual information and the management of class imbalance in datasets. Existing research approaches these two problems separately while they co-occur in real world applications. Here, we study the problem of learning incrementally from imbalanced datasets. We focus on algorithms which have a constant deep model complexity and use a bounded memory to store exemplars of old classes across incremental states. Since memory is bounded, old classes are learned with fewer images than new classes and an imbalance due to incremental learning is added to the initial dataset imbalance. A score prediction bias in favor of new classes appears and we evaluate a comprehensive set of score calibration methods to reduce it. Evaluation is carried with three datasets, using two dataset imbalance configurations and three bounded memory sizes. Results show that most calibration methods have beneficial effect and that they are most useful for lower bounded memory sizes, which are most interesting in practice. As a secondary contribution, we remove the usual distillation component from the loss function of incremental learning algorithms. We show that simpler vanilla fine tuning is a stronger backbone for imbalanced incremental learning algorithms.

(0 min) Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) methods learn a policy by iteratively performing multiple mini-batch optimization epochs of a surrogate objective with one set of sampled data. Ratio clipping PPO is a popular variant that clips the probability ratios between the target policy and the policy used to collect samples. Ratio clipping yields a pessimistic estimate of the original surrogate objective, and has been shown to be crucial for strong performance. We show in this paper that such ratio clipping may not be a good option as it can fail to effectively bound the ratios. Instead, one can directly optimize the original surrogate objective for multiple epochs; the key is to find a proper condition to early stop the optimization epoch in each iteration. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on how to determine when to stop the optimization epoch, and call the resulting algorithm Early Stopping Policy Optimization (ESPO). We compare ESPO with PPO across many continuous control tasks and show that ESPO significantly outperforms PPO. Furthermore, we show that ESPO can be easily scaled up to distributed training with many workers, delivering strong performance as well.

(0 min) The author's recent research papers, "Cumulative deviation of a subpopulation from the full population" and "A graphical method of cumulative differences between two subpopulations" (both published in volume 8 of Springer's open-access "Journal of Big Data" during 2021), propose graphical methods and summary statistics, without extensively calibrating formal significance tests. The summary metrics and methods can measure the calibration of probabilistic predictions and can assess differences in responses between a subpopulation and the full population while controlling for a covariate or score via conditioning on it. These recently published papers construct significance tests based on the scalar summary statistics, but only sketch how to calibrate the attained significance levels (also known as "P-values") for the tests. The present article reviews and synthesizes work spanning many decades in order to detail how to calibrate the P-values. The present paper presents computationally efficient, easily implemented numerical methods for evaluating properly calibrated P-values, together with rigorous mathematical proofs guaranteeing their accuracy, and illustrates and validates the methods with open-source software and numerical examples.

(0 min) While combinatorial problems are of great academic and practical importance, previous approaches like explicit search and reinforcement learning have been complex and costly. We therefore propose a simple and robust method to solve combinatorial problems whose goals are predefined. Assuming that more optimal moves occur more frequently as a path of random moves connecting two combinatorial states, we show that a Deep Neural Network can generate near-optimal solutions merely by training it to predict the last move of a random scramble based on the problem state. When solving 1,000 test cases of Rubik's Cube, our method outperformed DeepCubeA with a mean solution length of 21.27 moves, also achieving over 10 times higher efficiency for training and 2.0 times for inference. The proposed method may apply to other goal-predefined combinatorial problems, though it has a few constraints.

(0 min) Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have achieved impressive performance on tasks in a variety of domains. However, neural network policies produced with DRL methods are not human-interpretable and often have difficulty generalizing to novel scenarios. To address these issues, prior works explore learning programmatic policies that are more interpretable and structured for generalization. Yet, these works either employ limited policy representations (e.g. decision trees, state machines, or predefined program templates) or require stronger supervision (e.g. input/output state pairs or expert demonstrations). We present a framework that instead learns to synthesize a program, which details the procedure to solve a task in a flexible and expressive manner, solely from reward signals. To alleviate the difficulty of learning to compose programs to induce the desired agent behavior from scratch, we propose to first learn a program embedding space that continuously parameterizes diverse behaviors in an unsupervised manner and then search over the learned program embedding space to yield a program that maximizes the return for a given task. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework not only learns to reliably synthesize task-solving programs but also outperforms DRL and program synthesis baselines while producing interpretable and more generalizable policies. We also justify the necessity of the proposed two-stage learning scheme as well as analyze various methods for learning the program embedding.

(0 min) Similarity metrics such as representational similarity analysis (RSA) and centered kernel alignment (CKA) have been used to compare layer-wise representations between neural networks. However, these metrics are confounded by the population structure of data items in the input space, leading to spuriously high similarity for even completely random neural networks and inconsistent domain relations in transfer learning. We introduce a simple and generally applicable fix to adjust for the confounder with covariate adjustment regression, which retains the intuitive invariance properties of the original similarity measures. We show that deconfounding the similarity metrics increases the resolution of detecting semantically similar neural networks. Moreover, in real-world applications, deconfounding improves the consistency of representation similarities with domain similarities in transfer learning, and increases correlation with out-of-distribution accuracy.

(0 min) Natural language understanding and generation models follow one of the two dominant architectural paradigms: language models (LMs) that process concatenated sequences in a single stack of layers, and encoder-decoder models (EncDec) that utilize separate layer stacks for input and output processing. In machine translation, EncDec has long been the favoured approach, but with few studies investigating the performance of LMs. In this work, we thoroughly examine the role of several architectural design choices on the performance of LMs on bilingual, (massively) multilingual and zero-shot translation tasks, under systematic variations of data conditions and model sizes. Our results show that: (i) Different LMs have different scaling properties, where architectural differences often have a significant impact on model performance at small scales, but the performance gap narrows as the number of parameters increases, (ii) Several design choices, including causal masking and language-modeling objectives for the source sequence, have detrimental effects on translation quality, and (iii) When paired with full-visible masking for source sequences, LMs could perform on par with EncDec on supervised bilingual and multilingual translation tasks, and improve greatly on zero-shot directions by facilitating the reduction of off-target translations.

(0 min) We present a new monotonic improvement guarantee for optimizing decentralized policies in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), which holds even when the transition dynamics are non-stationary. This new analysis provides a theoretical understanding of the strong performance of two recent actor-critic methods for MARL, i.e., Independent Proximal Policy Optimization (IPPO) and Multi-Agent PPO (MAPPO), which both rely on independent ratios, i.e., computing probability ratios separately for each agent's policy. We show that, despite the non-stationarity that independent ratios cause, a monotonic improvement guarantee still arises as a result of enforcing the trust region constraint over all decentralized policies. We also show this trust region constraint can be effectively enforced in a principled way by bounding independent ratios based on the number of agents in training, providing a theoretical foundation for proximal ratio clipping. Moreover, we show that the surrogate objectives optimized in IPPO and MAPPO are essentially equivalent when their critics converge to a fixed point. Finally, our empirical results support the hypothesis that the strong performance of IPPO and MAPPO is a direct result of enforcing such a trust region constraint via clipping in centralized training, and the good values of the hyperparameters for this enforcement are highly sensitive to the number of agents, as predicted by our theoretical analysis.

(0 min) Mixtures of experts have become an indispensable tool for flexible modelling in a supervised learning context, and sparse Gaussian processes (GP) have shown promise as a leading candidate for the experts in such models. In this article, we propose to design the gating network for selecting the experts from such mixtures of sparse GPs using a deep neural network (DNN). Furthermore, an ultra-fast one pass algorithm called Cluster-Classify-Regress (CCR) is leveraged to approximate the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator extremely quickly. This powerful combination of model and algorithm together delivers a novel method which is flexible, robust, and extremely efficient. In particular, the method is able to outperform competing methods in terms of accuracy and uncertainty quantification. The cost is competitive on low-dimensional and small data sets but is significantly lower for higher dimensional and big data sets. Iteratively maximizing the distribution of experts given allocations and allocations given experts does not provide significant improvement, which indicates that the algorithm achieves a good approximation to the local MAP estimator very fast. This insight can be useful also in the context of other mixture of experts models.

(0 min) This paper proposes the Doubly Compressed Momentum-assisted Stochastic Gradient Tracking algorithm (DoCoM-SGT) for communication efficient decentralized learning. DoCoM-SGT utilizes two compression steps per communication round as the algorithm tracks simultaneously the averaged iterate and stochastic gradient. Furthermore, DoCoM-SGT incorporates a momentum based technique for reducing variances in the gradient estimates. We show that DoCoM-SGT finds a solution $\bar{\theta}$ in $T$ iterations satisfying $\mathbb{E} [ \| \nabla f(\bar{\theta}) \|^2 ] = {\cal O}( 1 / T^{2/3} )$ for non-convex objective functions; and we provide competitive convergence rate guarantees for other function classes. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets validate the efficacy of our algorithm.

(0 min) The imitation learning research community has recently made significant progress towards the goal of enabling artificial agents to imitate behaviors from video demonstrations alone. However, current state-of-the-art approaches developed for this problem exhibit high sample complexity due, in part, to the high-dimensional nature of video observations. Towards addressing this issue, we introduce here a new algorithm called Visual Generative Adversarial Imitation from Observation using a State Observer VGAIfO-SO. At its core, VGAIfO-SO seeks to address sample inefficiency using a novel, self-supervised state observer, which provides estimates of lower-dimensional proprioceptive state representations from high-dimensional images. We show experimentally in several continuous control environments that VGAIfO-SO is more sample efficient than other IfO algorithms at learning from video-only demonstrations and can sometimes even achieve performance close to the Generative Adversarial Imitation from Observation (GAIfO) algorithm that has privileged access to the demonstrator's proprioceptive state information.

(0 min) This essay shows the impact of deepfake technology on fan culture. The innovative technology provided the male audience with an instrument to express its ideas and plots. Which subsequently led to the rise of deepfake pornography. It is often seen as a part of celebrity studies; however, the essay shows that it could also be considered a type of fanfic and a product of participatory culture, sharing community origin, exploitation by commercial companies and deep sexualisation. These two branches of fanfic evolution can be connected via the genre of machinima pornography. Textual fanfics are mainly created by females for females, depicting males; otherwise, deepfake pornography and machinima are made by males and for males targeting females.

(0 min) The world is moving into a new era with the deployment of 5G communication infrastructure. Many new developments are deployed centred around this technology. One such advancement is 5G Vehicle to Everything communication. This technology can be used for applications such as driverless delivery of goods, immediate response to emergencies and improving traffic efficiency. The concept of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is built around this system which is completely autonomous. This paper studies the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack carried out over a 5G network and analyses security attacks, particularly the DDoS attack. The aim is to implement a machine learning model capable of classifying different types of DDoS attacks and predicting the quality of 5G latency. The initial steps of implementation involved the synthetic addition of 5G parameters into the dataset. Subsequently, the data was label encoded, and minority classes were oversampled to match the other classes. Finally, the data was split as training and testing, and machine learning models were applied. Although the paper resulted in a model that predicted DDoS attacks, the dataset acquired significantly lacked 5G related information. Furthermore, the 5G classification model needed more modification. The research was based on largely quantitative research methods in a simulated environment. Hence, the biggest limitation of this research has been the lack of resources for data collection and sole reliance on online data sets. Ideally, a Vehicle to Everything (V2X) project would greatly benefit from an autonomous 5G enabled vehicle connected to a mobile edge cloud. However, this project was conducted solely online on a single PC which further limits the outcomes. Although the model underperformed, this paper can be used as a framework for future research in Intelligent Transport System development.

(0 min) Signal-background classification is a central problem in High-Energy Physics, that plays a major role for the discovery of new fundamental particles. A recent method -- the Parametric Neural Network (pNN) -- leverages multiple signal mass hypotheses as an additional input feature to effectively replace a whole set of individual classifier, each providing (in principle) the best response for a single mass hypothesis. In this work we aim at deepening the understanding of pNNs in light of real-world usage. We discovered several peculiarities of parametric networks, providing intuition, metrics, and guidelines to them. We further propose an alternative parametrization scheme, resulting in a new parametrized neural network architecture: the AffinePNN; along with many other generally applicable improvements. Finally, we extensively evaluate our models on the HEPMASS dataset, along its imbalanced version (called HEPMASS-IMB) we provide here for the first time to further validate our approach. Provided results are in terms of the impact of the proposed design decisions, classification performance, and interpolation capability as well.

(0 min) Guided wave testing is a popular approach for monitoring the structural integrity of infrastructures. We focus on the primary task of damage detection, where signal processing techniques are commonly employed. The detection performance is affected by a mismatch between the wave propagation model and experimental wave data. External variations, such as temperature, which are difficult to model, also affect the performance. While deep learning models can be an alternative detection method, there is often a lack of real-world training datasets. In this work, we counter this challenge by training an ensemble of variational autoencoders only on simulation data with a wave physics-guided adversarial component. We set up an experiment with non-uniform temperature variations to test the robustness of the methods. We compare our scheme with existing deep learning detection schemes and observe superior performance on experimental data.

(0 min) Motivated by a real-world problem of blood coagulation control in Heparin-treated patients, we use Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) to formulate a new class of sequential prediction problems -- with an unknown latent space, unknown non-linear dynamics, and irregular sparse observations. We introduce the Neural Eigen-SDE (NESDE) algorithm for sequential prediction with sparse observations and adaptive dynamics. NESDE applies eigen-decomposition to the dynamics model to allow efficient frequent predictions given sparse observations. In addition, NESDE uses a learning mechanism for adaptive dynamics model, which handles changes in the dynamics both between sequences and within sequences. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficacy of NESDE for both synthetic problems and real-world data. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a patient-adapted prediction for blood coagulation following Heparin dosing in the MIMIC-IV dataset. Finally, we publish a simulated gym environment based on our prediction model, for experimentation in algorithms for blood coagulation control.

(0 min) This paper introduces Continual 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (Co3D CNNs), a new computational formulation of spatio-temporal 3D CNNs, in which videos are processed frame-by-frame rather than by clip. In online processing tasks demanding frame-wise predictions, Co3D CNNs dispense with the computational redundancies of regular 3D CNNs, namely the repeated convolutions over frames, which appear in overlapping clips. We show that Continual 3D CNNs can reuse preexisting 3D-CNN weights to reduce the per-prediction floating point operations (FLOPs) in proportion to the temporal receptive field while retaining similar memory requirements and accuracy. This is validated with multiple models on the Kinetics-400 and Charades datasets with remarkable results: Continual X3D models attain state-of-the-art complexity/accuracy trade-offs on Kinetics-400 with 12.1-15.3x reductions of FLOPs and 2.3-3.8% improvements in accuracy compared to regular X3D models while reducing peak memory consumption by up to 48%. Moreover, we investigate the transient response of Co3D CNNs at start-up and perform an extensive benchmark of on-hardware processing speed and accuracy for publicly available 3D CNNs.

(0 min) Anomalies (or outliers) are prevalent in real-world empirical observations and potentially mask important underlying structures. Accurate identification of anomalous samples is crucial for the success of downstream data analysis tasks. To automatically identify anomalies, we propose Probabilistic Robust AutoEncoder (PRAE). PRAE is designed to simultaneously remove outliers and identify a low-dimensional representation for the inlier samples. We first present the Robust AutoEncoder (RAE) intractable objective as a minimization problem for splitting the data to inlier samples from which a low dimensional representation is learned via an AutoEncoder (AE), and anomalous (outlier) samples that are excluded as they do not fit the low dimensional representation. RAE minimizes the autoencoder's reconstruction error while incorporating as many samples as possible. This could be formulated via regularization by subtracting from the reconstruction term an $\ell_0$ norm counting the number of selected samples. Unfortunately, this leads to an intractable combinatorial problem. Therefore, we propose two probabilistic relaxations of RAE, which are differentiable and alleviate the need for a combinatorial search. We prove that the solution to the PRAE problem is equivalent to the solution of RAE. We use synthetic data to show that PRAE can accurately remove outliers in a wide range of contamination frequencies. Finally, we demonstrate that using PRAE for anomaly detection leads to state-of-the-art results on various benchmark datasets.

(0 min) Diffusion models have recently shown great promise for generative modeling, outperforming GANs on perceptual quality and autoregressive models at density estimation. A remaining downside is their slow sampling time: generating high quality samples takes many hundreds or thousands of model evaluations. Here we make two contributions to help eliminate this downside: First, we present new parameterizations of diffusion models that provide increased stability when using few sampling steps. Second, we present a method to distill a trained deterministic diffusion sampler, using many steps, into a new diffusion model that takes half as many sampling steps. We then keep progressively applying this distillation procedure to our model, halving the number of required sampling steps each time. On standard image generation benchmarks like CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and LSUN, we start out with state-of-the-art samplers taking as many as 8192 steps, and are able to distill down to models taking as few as 4 steps without losing much perceptual quality; achieving, for example, a FID of 3.0 on CIFAR-10 in 4 steps. Finally, we show that the full progressive distillation procedure does not take more time than it takes to train the original model, thus representing an efficient solution for generative modeling using diffusion at both train and test time.

(0 min) Despite the non-convex optimization landscape, over-parametrized shallow networks are able to achieve global convergence under gradient descent. The picture can be radically different for narrow networks, which tend to get stuck in badly-generalizing local minima. Here we investigate the cross-over between these two regimes in the high-dimensional setting, and in particular investigate the connection between the so-called mean-field/hydrodynamic regime and the seminal approach of Saad & Solla. Focusing on the case of Gaussian data, we study the interplay between the learning rate, the time scale, and the number of hidden units in the high-dimensional dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Our work builds on a deterministic description of SGD in high-dimensions from statistical physics, which we extend and for which we provide rigorous convergence rates.

(0 min) While deep learning approaches to information extraction have had many successes, they can be difficult to augment or maintain as needs shift. Rule-based methods, on the other hand, can be more easily modified. However, crafting rules requires expertise in linguistics and the domain of interest, making it infeasible for most users. Here we attempt to combine the advantages of these two directions while mitigating their drawbacks. We adapt recent advances from the adjacent field of program synthesis to information extraction, synthesizing rules from provided examples. We use a transformer-based architecture to guide an enumerative search, and show that this reduces the number of steps that need to be explored before a rule is found. Further, we show that without training the synthesis algorithm on the specific domain, our synthesized rules achieve state-of-the-art performance on the 1-shot scenario of a task that focuses on few-shot learning for relation classification, and competitive performance in the 5-shot scenario.

(0 min) Large scale databases with high-quality manual annotations are scarce in audio domain. We thus explore a self-supervised graph approach to learning audio representations from highly limited labelled data. Considering each audio sample as a graph node, we propose a subgraph-based framework with novel self-supervision tasks that can learn effective audio representations. During training, subgraphs are constructed by sampling the entire pool of available training data to exploit the relationship between the labelled and unlabeled audio samples. During inference, we use random edges to alleviate the overhead of graph construction. We evaluate our model on three benchmark audio databases, and two tasks: acoustic event detection and speech emotion recognition. Our semi-supervised model performs better or on par with fully supervised models and outperforms several competitive existing models. Our model is compact (240k parameters), and can produce generalized audio representations that are robust to different types of signal noise.

(0 min) Numerous studies have investigated the effectiveness of audio-visual multimodal learning for speech enhancement (AVSE) tasks, seeking a solution that uses visual data as auxiliary and complementary input to reduce the noise of noisy speech signals. Recently, we proposed a lite audio-visual speech enhancement (LAVSE) algorithm for a car-driving scenario. Compared to conventional AVSE systems, LAVSE requires less online computation and to some extent solves the user privacy problem on facial data. In this study, we extend LAVSE to improve its ability to address three practical issues often encountered in implementing AVSE systems, namely, the additional cost of processing visual data, audio-visual asynchronization, and low-quality visual data. The proposed system is termed improved LAVSE (iLAVSE), which uses a convolutional recurrent neural network architecture as the core AVSE model. We evaluate iLAVSE on the Taiwan Mandarin speech with video dataset. Experimental results confirm that compared to conventional AVSE systems, iLAVSE can effectively overcome the aforementioned three practical issues and can improve enhancement performance. The results also confirm that iLAVSE is suitable for real-world scenarios, where high-quality audio-visual sensors may not always be available.

(0 min) Learning arguments is highly relevant to the field of explainable artificial intelligence. It is a family of symbolic machine learning techniques that is particularly human-interpretable. These techniques learn a set of arguments as an intermediate representation. Arguments are small rules with exceptions that can be chained to larger arguments for making predictions or decisions. We investigate the learning of arguments, specifically the learning of arguments from a 'case model' proposed by Verheij [34]. The case model in Verheij's approach are cases or scenarios in a legal setting. The number of cases in a case model are relatively low. Here, we investigate whether Verheij's approach can be used for learning arguments from other types of data sets with a much larger number of instances. We compare the learning of arguments from a case model with the HeRO algorithm [15] and learning a decision tree.

(0 min) Policy gradient (PG) estimation becomes a challenge when we are not allowed to sample with the target policy but only have access to a dataset generated by some unknown behavior policy. Conventional methods for off-policy PG estimation often suffer from either significant bias or exponentially large variance. In this paper, we propose the double Fitted PG estimation (FPG) algorithm. FPG can work with an arbitrary policy parameterization, assuming access to a Bellman-complete value function class. In the case of linear value function approximation, we provide a tight finite-sample upper bound on policy gradient estimation error, that is governed by the amount of distribution mismatch measured in feature space. We also establish the asymptotic normality of FPG estimation error with a precise covariance characterization, which is further shown to be statistically optimal with a matching Cramer-Rao lower bound. Empirically, we evaluate the performance of FPG on both policy gradient estimation and policy optimization, using either softmax tabular or ReLU policy networks. Under various metrics, our results show that FPG significantly outperforms existing off-policy PG estimation methods based on importance sampling and variance reduction techniques.

(0 min) Any modern system writes events into files, called log files. Those contain crucial information which are subject to various analyses. Examples range from cybersecurity, intrusion detection over usage analyses to trouble shooting. Before data analysis is possible, desired information needs to be extracted first out of the semi-structured log messages. State-of-the-art event parsing often assumes static log events. However, any modern system is updated consistently and with updates also log file structures can change. We call those changes "mutation" and study parsing performance for different mutation cases. Latest research discovers mutations using anomaly detection post mortem, however, does not cover actual continuous parsing. Thus, we propose a novel and flexible parser, called FlexParser, which can extract desired values despite gradual changes in the log messages. It implies basic text preprocessing followed by a supervised Deep Learning method. We train a stateful LSTM on parsing one event per data set. Statefulness enforces the model to learn log message structures across several examples. Our model was tested on seven different, publicly available log file data sets and various kinds of mutations. Exhibiting an average F1-Score of 0.98, it outperforms other Deep Learning methods as well as state-of-the-art unsupervised parsers.

(0 min) This study deals with two-dimensional (2D) signal processing using the wavelet packet transform. When the basis is unknown the candidate of basis increases in exponential order with respect to the signal size. Previous studies do not consider the basis as a random vaiables. Therefore, the cost function needs to be used to select a basis. However, this method is often a heuristic and a greedy search because it is impossible to search all the candidates for a huge number of bases. Therefore, it is difficult to evaluate the entire signal processing under a criterion and also it does not always gurantee the optimality of the entire signal processing. In this study, we propose a stochastic generative model in which the basis is regarded as a random variable. This makes it possible to evaluate entire signal processing under a unified criterion i.e. Bayes criterion. Moreover we can derive an optimal signal processing scheme that achieves the theoretical limit. This derived scheme shows that all the bases should be combined according to the posterior in stead of selecting a single basis. Although exponential order calculations is required for this scheme, we have derived a recursive algorithm for this scheme, which successfully reduces the computational complexity from the exponential order to the polynomial order.

(0 min) Recent works have demonstrated great success in training large autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-3) on unlabeled text corpus for text generation. To reduce their expensive training cost, practitioners attempt to increase the batch sizes and learning rates. However, increasing them often cause training instabilities and poor generalization. On the other side, using smaller batch sizes or learning rates would reduce the training efficiency, significantly increasing training time and cost. We investigate this stability-efficiency dilemma and identify that long sequence length is one of the main causes of training instability in large-scale GPT model pre-training. Based on our analysis, we present a novel sequence length warmup method that simultaneously improves training stability and efficiency. As a kind of curriculum learning approach, our method improves the training convergence speed of autoregressive models. More importantly, our in-depth analysis shows that our method exerts a gradient variance reduction effect and regularizes early stages of training where the amount of training data is much smaller than the model capacity. This enables stable training with much larger batch sizes and learning rates, further improving the training speed. Evaluations show that our approach enables stable GPT-2 (117M and 1.5B) pre-training with 8x larger batch size and 4x larger learning rate, whereas the baseline approach struggles with training instability. To achieve the same or better zero-shot WikiText-103/LAMBADA evaluation results, our approach reduces the required number of pre-training tokens and wall clock time by up to 55\% and 73\%, respectively.

(2 min) Geometric deep learning has sparked a rising interest in computer graphics to perform shape understanding tasks, such as shape classification and semantic segmentation on three-dimensional (3D) geometric surfaces. Previous works explored the significant direction by defining the operations of convolution and pooling on triangle meshes, but most methods explicitly utilized the graph connection structure of the mesh. Motivated by the geometric spectral surface reconstruction theory, we introduce a novel and flexible convolutional neural network (CNN) model, called Laplacian2Mesh, for 3D triangle mesh, which maps the features of mesh in the Euclidean space to the multi-dimensional Laplacian-Beltrami space, which is similar to the multi-resolution input in 2D CNN. Mesh pooling is applied to expand the receptive field of the network by the multi-space transformation of Laplacian which retains the surface topology, and channel self-attention convolutions are applied in the new space. Since implicitly using the intrinsic geodesic connections of the mesh through the adjacency matrix, we do not consider the number of the neighbors of the vertices, thereby mesh data with different numbers of vertices can be input. Experiments on various learning tasks applied to 3D meshes demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Laplacian2Mesh.

(0 min) Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has recently seen tremendous progress, allowing the design of novel machine learning applications to preserve the privacy of the training data. Existing theoretical results in this field mainly focus on distributed optimization for minimization problems. This paper is the first to study PFL for saddle point problems (which cover a broader class of optimization problems), allowing for a more rich class of applications requiring more than just solving minimization problems. In this work, we consider a recently proposed PFL setting with the mixing objective function, an approach combining the learning of a global model together with locally distributed learners. Unlike most previous work, which considered only the centralized setting, we work in a more general and decentralized setup that allows us to design and analyze more practical and federated ways to connect devices to the network. We proposed new algorithms to address this problem and provide a theoretical analysis of the smooth (strongly-)convex-(strongly-)concave saddle point problems in stochastic and deterministic cases. Numerical experiments for bilinear problems and neural networks with adversarial noise demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

(0 min) Standard gradient descent-ascent (GDA)-type algorithms can only find stationary points in nonconvex minimax optimization, which are far more sub-optimal than local minimax points. In this work, we develop GDA-type algorithms that globally converge to local minimax points in nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization. We first observe that local minimax points are equivalent to second-order stationary points of a certain envelope function. Then, inspired by the classic cubic regularization algorithm, we propose Cubic-GDA--a cubic-regularized GDA algorithm for finding local minimax points, and provide a comprehensive convergence analysis by leveraging its intrinsic potential function. Specifically, we establish the global convergence of Cubic-GDA to a local minimax point at a sublinear convergence rate. We further analyze the asymptotic convergence rate of Cubic-GDA in the full spectrum of a local gradient dominant-type nonconvex geometry, establishing orderwise faster asymptotic convergence rates than the standard GDA. Moreover, we propose a stochastic variant of Cubic-GDA for large-scale minimax optimization, and characterize its sample complexity under stochastic sub-sampling.

(0 min) In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown superior performance on diverse real-world applications. To improve the model capacity, besides designing aggregation operations, GNN topology design is also very important. In general, there are two mainstream GNN topology design manners. The first one is to stack aggregation operations to obtain the higher-level features but easily got performance drop as the network goes deeper. Secondly, the multiple aggregation operations are utilized in each layer which provides adequate and independent feature extraction stage on local neighbors while are costly to obtain the higher-level information. To enjoy the benefits while alleviating the corresponding deficiencies of these two manners, we learn to design the topology of GNNs in a novel feature fusion perspective which is dubbed F$^2$GNN. To be specific, we provide a feature fusion perspective in designing GNN topology and propose a novel framework to unify the existing topology designs with feature selection and fusion strategies. Then we develop a neural architecture search method on top of the unified framework which contains a set of selection and fusion operations in the search space and an improved differentiable search algorithm. The performance gains on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of F$^2$GNN. We further conduct experiments to show that F$^2$GNN can improve the model capacity while alleviating the deficiencies of existing GNN topology design manners, especially alleviating the over-smoothing problem, by utilizing different levels of features adaptively.

(0 min) We propose a single time-scale actor-critic algorithm to solve the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. A least squares temporal difference (LSTD) method is applied to the critic and a natural policy gradient method is used for the actor. We give a proof of convergence with sample complexity $\mO(\ve^{-1} \log(\ve^{-1})^2)$. The method in the proof is applicable to general single time-scale bilevel optimization problem. We also numerically validate our theoretical results on the convergence.

(0 min) In most real-world applications, it is seldom the case that a given observable evolves independently of its environment. In social networks, users' behavior results from the people they interact with, news in their feed, or trending topics. In natural language, the meaning of phrases emerges from the combination of words. In general medicine, a diagnosis is established on the basis of the interaction of symptoms. Here, we propose a new model, the Interactive Mixed Membership Stochastic Block Model (IMMSBM), which investigates the role of interactions between entities (hashtags, words, memes, etc.) and quantifies their importance within the aforementioned corpora. We find that interactions play an important role in those corpora. In inference tasks, taking them into account leads to average relative changes with respect to non-interactive models of up to 150\% in the probability of an outcome. Furthermore, their role greatly improves the predictive power of the model. Our findings suggest that neglecting interactions when modeling real-world phenomena might lead to incorrect conclusions being drawn.

(2 min) Given the counters of vehicles that traverse the roads of a traffic network, we aim at reconstructing the travel demand that generated them expressed in terms of the number of origin-destination trips made by users. We model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem. In the inner level, given a tentative travel demand, we solve a dynamic traffic assignment problem to decide the routing of the users between their origins and destinations. In the outer level, we adjust the number of trips and their origins and destinations, aiming at minimizing the discrepancy between the consequent counters generated in the inner level and the given vehicle counts measured by sensors in the traffic network. We solve the dynamic traffic assignment problem employing a mesoscopic model implemented by the traffic simulator SUMO. Thus, the outer problem becomes an optimization problem that minimizes a black-box objective function determined by the results of the simulation, which is a costly computation. We study different approaches to the outer level problem categorized as gradient-based and derivative-free approaches. Among the gradient-based approaches, we study an assignment matrix-based approach and an assignment matrix-free approach that uses the Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) algorithm. Among the derivative-free approaches, we study machine learning algorithms to learn a model of the simulator that can then be used as a surrogated objective function in the optimization problem. We compare these approaches computationally on an artificial network. The gradient-based approaches perform the best in terms of archived solution quality and computational requirements, while the results obtained by the machine learning approach are currently less satisfactory but provide an interesting avenue of future research.

(2 min) Young exoplanets and their corresponding host stars are fascinating laboratories for constraining the timescale of planetary evolution and planet-star interactions. However, because young stars are typically much more active than the older population, in order to discover more young exoplanets, greater knowledge of the wide array of young star variability is needed. Here Kohonen Self Organising Maps (SOMs) are used to explore young star variability present in the first year of observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), with such knowledge valuable to perform targeted detrending of young stars in the future. This technique was found to be particularly effective at separating the signals of young eclipsing binaries and potential transiting objects from stellar variability, a list of which are provided in this paper. The effect of pre-training the Self-Organising Maps on known variability classes was tested, but found to be challenging without a significant training set from TESS. SOMs were also found to provide an intuitive and informative overview of leftover systematics in the TESS data, providing an important new way to characterise troublesome systematics in photometric data-sets. This paper represents the first stage of the wider YOUNGSTER program, which will use a machine-learning-based approach to classification and targeted detrending of young stars in order to improve the recovery of smaller young exoplanets.

(2 min) Computer graphics has experienced a recent surge of data-centric approaches for photorealistic and controllable content creation. StyleGAN in particular sets new standards for generative modeling regarding image quality and controllability. However, StyleGAN's performance severely degrades on large unstructured datasets such as ImageNet. StyleGAN was designed for controllability; hence, prior works suspect its restrictive design to be unsuitable for diverse datasets. In contrast, we find the main limiting factor to be the current training strategy. Following the recently introduced Projected GAN paradigm, we leverage powerful neural network priors and a progressive growing strategy to successfully train the latest StyleGAN3 generator on ImageNet. Our final model, StyleGAN-XL, sets a new state-of-the-art on large-scale image synthesis and is the first to generate images at a resolution of $1024^2$ at such a dataset scale. We demonstrate that this model can invert and edit images beyond the narrow domain of portraits or specific object classes.

(2 min) There is a fundamental limitation in the prediction performance that a machine learning model can achieve due to the inevitable uncertainty of the prediction target. In classification problems, this can be characterized by the Bayes error, which is the best achievable error with any classifier. The Bayes error can be used as a criterion to evaluate classifiers with state-of-the-art performance and can be used to detect test set overfitting. We propose a simple and direct Bayes error estimator, where we just take the mean of the labels that show \emph{uncertainty} of the classes. Our flexible approach enables us to perform Bayes error estimation even for weakly supervised data. In contrast to others, our method is model-free and even instance-free. Moreover, it has no hyperparameters and gives a more accurate estimate of the Bayes error than classifier-based baselines. Experiments using our method suggest that a recently proposed classifier, the Vision Transformer, may have already reached the Bayes error for certain benchmark datasets.

(0 min) The domain generalization (DG) problem setting challenges a model trained on multiple known data distributions to generalise well on unseen data distributions. Due to its practical importance, a large number of methods have been proposed to address this challenge. However much of the work in general purpose DG is heuristically motivated, as the DG problem is hard to model formally; and recent evaluations have cast doubt on existing methods' practical efficacy -- in particular compared to a well tuned empirical risk minimisation baseline. We present a novel learning-theoretic generalisation bound for DG that bounds unseen domain generalisation performance in terms of the model's Rademacher complexity. Based on this, we conjecture that existing methods' efficacy or lack thereof is largely determined by an empirical risk vs predictor complexity trade-off, and demonstrate that their performance variability can be explained in these terms. Algorithmically, this analysis suggests that domain generalisation should be achieved by simply performing regularised ERM with a leave-one-domain-out cross-validation objective. Empirical results on the DomainBed benchmark corroborate this.

(2 min) In this manuscript, we offer a gentle review of submodularity and supermodularity and their properties. We offer a plethora of submodular definitions; a full description of a number of example submodular functions and their generalizations; example discrete constraints; a discussion of basic algorithms for maximization, minimization, and other operations; a brief overview of continuous submodular extensions; and some historical applications. We then turn to how submodularity is useful in machine learning and artificial intelligence. This includes summarization, and we offer a complete account of the differences between and commonalities amongst sketching, coresets, extractive and abstractive summarization in NLP, data distillation and condensation, and data subset selection and feature selection. We discuss a variety of ways to produce a submodular function useful for machine learning, including heuristic hand-crafting, learning or approximately learning a submodular function or aspects thereof, and some advantages of the use of a submodular function as a coreset producer. We discuss submodular combinatorial information functions, and how submodularity is useful for clustering, data partitioning, parallel machine learning, active and semi-supervised learning, probabilistic modeling, and structured norms and loss functions.

(2 min) In this work we employ an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network to predict the failure locations of porous metal tension specimens based only on their initial porosities. The process we model is complex, with a progression from initial void nucleation, to saturation, and ultimately failure. The objective of predicting failure locations presents an extreme case of class imbalance since most of the material in the specimens do not fail. In response to this challenge, we develop and demonstrate the effectiveness of data- and loss-based regularization methods. Since there is considerable sensitivity of the failure location to the particular configuration of voids, we also use variational inference to provide uncertainties for the neural network predictions. We connect the deterministic and Bayesian convolutional neural networks at a theoretical level to explain how variational inference regularizes the training and predictions. We demonstrate that the resulting predicted variances are effective in ranking the locations that are most likely to fail in any given specimen.

(2 min) In the last years predict-and-optimize approaches, also known as decision-focussed learning, have received increasing attention. In this setting, the predictions of machine learning models are used as estimated cost coefficients in the objective function of a discrete combinatorial optimization problems for decision making. Predict-and-optimize approaches propose to train the ML models, often neural network models, by directly optimizing the quality of decisions made by the optimization solvers. Based on recent work that proposed a Noise Contrastive Estimation loss over a subset of the solution space, we observe that predict-and-optimize can more generally be seen as a learning-to-rank problem. That is, the goal is to learn an objective function that ranks the feasible points correctly. This approach is independent of the optimization method used and of the form of the objective function. We develop pointwise, pairwise and listwise ranking loss functions, which can be differentiated in closed form given a subset of solutions. We empirically investigate the quality of our generic method compared to existing predict-and-optimize approaches with competitive results. Furthermore, controlling the subset of solutions allows controlling the runtime considerably, with limited effect on regret.

(2 min) A differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) autoencoder is a musical sound synthesizer that combines a deep neural network (DNN) and spectral modeling synthesis. It allows us to flexibly edit sounds by changing the fundamental frequency, timbre feature, and loudness (synthesis parameters) extracted from an input sound. However, it is designed for a monophonic harmonic sound and cannot handle mixtures of harmonic sounds. In this paper, we propose a model (DDSP mixture model) that represents a mixture as the sum of the outputs of multiple pretrained DDSP autoencoders. By fitting the output of the proposed model to the observed mixture, we can directly estimate the synthesis parameters of each source. Through synthesis parameter extraction experiments, we show that the proposed method has high and stable performance compared with a straightforward method that applies the DDSP autoencoder to the signals separated by an audio source separation method.

(2 min) In modern neural networks like Transformers, linear layers require significant memory to store activations during backward pass. This study proposes a memory reduction approach to perform backpropagation through linear layers. Since the gradients of linear layers are computed by matrix multiplications, we consider methods for randomized matrix multiplications and demonstrate that they require less memory with a moderate decrease of the test accuracy. Also, we investigate the variance of the gradient estimate induced by the randomized matrix multiplication. We compare this variance with the variance coming from gradient estimation based on the batch of samples. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method on the fine-tuning of the pre-trained RoBERTa model on GLUE tasks.

(0 min) Memory footprint is one of the main limiting factors for large neural network training. In backpropagation, one needs to store the input to each operation in the computational graph. Every modern neural network model has quite a few pointwise nonlinearities in its architecture, and such operation induces additional memory costs which -- as we show -- can be significantly reduced by quantization of the gradients. We propose a systematic approach to compute optimal quantization of the retained gradients of the pointwise nonlinear functions with only a few bits per each element. We show that such approximation can be achieved by computing optimal piecewise-constant approximation of the derivative of the activation function, which can be done by dynamic programming. The drop-in replacements are implemented for all popular nonlinearities and can be used in any existing pipeline. We confirm the memory reduction and the same convergence on several open benchmarks.

(3 min) In DP-SGD each round communicates a local SGD update which leaks some new information about the underlying local data set to the outside world. In order to provide privacy, Gaussian noise with standard deviation $\sigma$ is added to local SGD updates after performing a clipping operation. We show that for attaining $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy $\sigma$ can be chosen equal to $\sqrt{2(\epsilon +\ln(1/\delta))/\epsilon}$ for $\epsilon=\Omega(T/N^2)$, where $T$ is the total number of rounds and $N$ is equal to the size of the local data set. In many existing machine learning problems, $N$ is always large and $T=O(N)$. Hence, $\sigma$ becomes "independent" of any $T=O(N)$ choice with $\epsilon=\Omega(1/N)$. This means that our $\sigma$ only depends on $N$ rather than $T$. As shown in our paper, this differential privacy characterization allows one to {\it a-priori} select parameters of DP-SGD based on a fixed privacy budget (in terms of $\epsilon$ and $\delta$) in such a way to optimize the anticipated utility (test accuracy) the most. This ability of planning ahead together with $\sigma$'s independence of $T$ (which allows local gradient computations to be split among as many rounds as needed, even for large $T$ as usually happens in practice) leads to a {\it proactive DP-SGD algorithm} that allows a client to balance its privacy budget with the accuracy of the learned global model based on local test data. We notice that the current state-of-the art differential privacy accountant method based on $f$-DP has a closed form for computing the privacy loss for DP-SGD. However, due to its interpretation complexity, it cannot be used in a simple way to plan ahead. Instead, accountant methods are only used for keeping track of how privacy budget has been spent (after the fact).

(0 min) With a variety of local feature attribution methods being proposed in recent years, follow-up work suggested several evaluation strategies. To assess the attribution quality across different attribution techniques, the most popular among these evaluation strategies in the image domain use pixel perturbations. However, recent advances discovered that different evaluation strategies produce conflicting rankings of attribution methods and can be prohibitively expensive to compute. In this work, we present an information-theoretic analysis of evaluation strategies based on pixel perturbations. Our findings reveal that the results output by different evaluation strategies are strongly affected by information leakage through the shape of the removed pixels as opposed to their actual values. Using our theoretical insights, we propose a novel evaluation framework termed Remove and Debias (ROAD) which offers two contributions: First, it mitigates the impact of the confounders, which entails higher consistency among evaluation strategies. Second, ROAD does not require the computationally expensive retraining step and saves up to 99% in computational costs compared to the state-of-the-art. Our source code is available at https://github.com/tleemann/road_evaluation.

(2 min) Learning causal relationships in high-dimensional data (images, videos) is a hard task, as they are often defined on low dimensional manifolds and must be extracted from complex signals dominated by appearance, lighting, textures and also spurious correlations in the data. We present a method for learning counterfactual reasoning of physical processes in pixel space, which requires the prediction of the impact of interventions on initial conditions. Going beyond the identification of structural relationships, we deal with the challenging problem of forecasting raw video over long horizons. Our method does not require the knowledge or supervision of any ground truth positions or other object or scene properties. Our model learns and acts on a suitable hybrid latent representation based on a combination of dense features, sets of 2D keypoints and an additional latent vector per keypoint. We show that this better captures the dynamics of physical processes than purely dense or sparse representations. We introduce a new challenging and carefully designed counterfactual benchmark for predictions in pixel space and outperform strong baselines in physics-inspired ML and video prediction.

(3 min) Motivation: Machine learning based prediction of compound-protein interactions (CPIs) is important for drug design, screening and repurposing studies and can improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of wet lab assays. Despite the publication of many research papers reporting CPI predictors in the recent years, we have observed a number of fundamental issues in experiment design that lead to over optimistic estimates of model performance. Results: In this paper, we analyze the impact of several important factors affecting generalization perfor-mance of CPI predictors that are overlooked in existing work: 1. Similarity between training and test examples in cross-validation 2. The strategy for generating negative examples, in the absence of experimentally verified negative examples. 3. Choice of evaluation protocols and performance metrics and their alignment with real-world use of CPI predictors in screening large compound libraries. Using both an existing state-of-the-art method (CPI-NN) and a proposed kernel based approach, we have found that assessment of predictive performance of CPI predictors requires careful con-trol over similarity between training and test examples. We also show that random pairing for gen-erating synthetic negative examples for training and performance evaluation results in models with better generalization performance in comparison to more sophisticated strategies used in existing studies. Furthermore, we have found that our kernel based approach, despite its simple design, exceeds the prediction performance of CPI-NN. We have used the proposed model for compound screening of several proteins including SARS-CoV-2 Spike and Human ACE2 proteins and found strong evidence in support of its top hits. Availability: Code and raw experimental results available at https://github.com/adibayaseen/HKRCPI Contact: Fayyaz.minhas@warwick.ac.uk

(2 min) In this paper, we propose an access control method for object detection models. The use of encrypted images or encrypted feature maps has been demonstrated to be effective in access control of models from unauthorized access. However, the effectiveness of the approach has been confirmed in only image classification models and semantic segmentation models, but not in object detection models. In this paper, the use of encrypted feature maps is shown to be effective in access control of object detection models for the first time.

(2 min) While deep networks can learn complex functions such as classifiers, detectors, and trackers, many applications require models that continually adapt to changing input distributions, changing tasks, and changing environmental conditions. Indeed, this ability to continuously accrue knowledge and use past experience to learn new tasks quickly in continual settings is one of the key properties of an intelligent system. For complex and high-dimensional problems, simply updating the model continually with standard learning algorithms such as gradient descent may result in slow adaptation. Meta-learning can provide a powerful tool to accelerate adaptation yet is conventionally studied in batch settings. In this paper, we study how meta-learning can be applied to tackle online problems of this nature, simultaneously adapting to changing tasks and input distributions and meta-training the model in order to adapt more quickly in the future. Extending meta-learning into the online setting presents its own challenges, and although several prior methods have studied related problems, they generally require a discrete notion of tasks, with known ground-truth task boundaries. Such methods typically adapt to each task in sequence, resetting the model between tasks, rather than adapting continuously across tasks. In many real-world settings, such discrete boundaries are unavailable, and may not even exist. To address these settings, we propose a Fully Online Meta-Learning (FOML) algorithm, which does not require any ground truth knowledge about the task boundaries and stays fully online without resetting back to pre-trained weights. Our experiments show that FOML was able to learn new tasks faster than the state-of-the-art online learning methods on Rainbow-MNIST, CIFAR100 and CELEBA datasets.

(2 min) Continuous depth neural networks, such as Neural ODEs, have refashioned the understanding of residual neural networks in terms of non-linear vector-valued optimal control problems. The common solution is to use the adjoint sensitivity method to replicate a forward-backward pass optimisation problem. We propose a new approach which explicates the network's `depth' as a fundamental variable, thus reducing the problem to a system of forward-facing initial value problems. This new method is based on the principle of `Invariant Imbedding' for which we prove a general solution, applicable to all non-linear, vector-valued optimal control problems with both running and terminal loss. Our new architectures provide a tangible tool for inspecting the theoretical--and to a great extent unexplained--properties of network depth. They also constitute a resource of discrete implementations of Neural ODEs comparable to classes of imbedded residual neural networks. Through a series of experiments, we show the competitive performance of the proposed architectures for supervised learning and time series prediction.

(2 min) Collective intelligence is a fundamental trait shared by several species of living organisms. It has allowed them to thrive in the diverse environmental conditions that exist on our planet. From simple organisations in an ant colony to complex systems in human groups, collective intelligence is vital for solving complex survival tasks. As is commonly observed, such natural systems are flexible to changes in their structure. Specifically, they exhibit a high degree of generalization when the abilities or the total number of agents changes within a system. We term this phenomenon as Combinatorial Generalization (CG). CG is a highly desirable trait for autonomous systems as it can increase their utility and deployability across a wide range of applications. While recent works addressing specific aspects of CG have shown impressive results on complex domains, they provide no performance guarantees when generalizing towards novel situations. In this work, we shed light on the theoretical underpinnings of CG for cooperative multi-agent systems (MAS). Specifically, we study generalization bounds under a linear dependence of the underlying dynamics on the agent capabilities, which can be seen as a generalization of Successor Features to MAS. We then extend the results first for Lipschitz and then arbitrary dependence of rewards on team capabilities. Finally, empirical analysis on various domains using the framework of multi-agent reinforcement learning highlights important desiderata for multi-agent algorithms towards ensuring CG.

(2 min) Personalization enables businesses to learn customer preferences from past interactions and thus to target individual customers with more relevant content. We consider the problem of predicting the optimal promotional offer for a given customer out of several options as a contextual bandit problem. Identifying information for the customer and/or the campaign can be used to deduce unknown customer/campaign features that improve optimal offer prediction. Using a generated synthetic email promo dataset, we demonstrate similar prediction accuracies for (a) a wide and deep network that takes identifying information (or other categorical features) as input to the wide part and (b) a deep-only neural network that includes embeddings of categorical features in the input. Improvements in accuracy from including categorical features depends on the variability of the unknown numerical features for each category. We also show that selecting options using upper confidence bound or Thompson sampling, approximated via Monte Carlo dropout layers in the wide and deep models, slightly improves model performance.

(2 min) We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of an algorithm to have its program as an input). The conclusions agree with scientific findings in both biology and neuroscience and provide a plethora of explanations both (in conjunction with Darwinism) about evolution, as well as for the functionality and learning capabilities of human brain, (most importantly), as we perceive them in ourselves.

(2 min) We introduce Contrastive Intrinsic Control (CIC), an algorithm for unsupervised skill discovery that maximizes the mutual information between skills and state transitions. In contrast to most prior approaches, CIC uses a decomposition of the mutual information that explicitly incentivizes diverse behaviors by maximizing state entropy. We derive a novel lower bound estimate for the mutual information which combines a particle estimator for state entropy to generate diverse behaviors and contrastive learning to distill these behaviors into distinct skills. We evaluate our algorithm on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark, which consists of a long reward-free pre-training phase followed by a short adaptation phase to downstream tasks with extrinsic rewards. We find that CIC substantially improves over prior unsupervised skill discovery methods and outperforms the next leading overall exploration algorithm in terms of downstream task performance.

(2 min) The present study is an attempt made to create a new tool for the analysis of Land Use Land Cover (LUCL) images in 3D visualization. This study mainly uses spatial data mining techniques on high resolution LULC satellite imagery. Visualization of feature space allows exploration of patterns in the image data and insight into the classification process and related uncertainty. Visual Data Mining provides added value to image classifications as the user can be involved in the classification process providing increased confidence in and understanding of the results. In this study, we present a prototype of image segmentation, K-Means clustering and 3D visualization tool for visual data mining (VDM) of LUCL satellite imagery into volume visualization. This volume based representation divides feature space into spheres or voxels. The visualization tool is showcased in a classification study of high-resolution LULC imagery of Latur district (Maharashtra state, India) is used as sample data.

(2 min) Adam has been widely adopted for training deep neural networks due to less hyperparameter tuning and remarkable performance. To improve generalization, Adam is typically used in tandem with a squared $\ell_2$ regularizer (referred to as Adam-$\ell_2$). However, even better performance can be obtained with AdamW, which decouples the gradient of the regularizer from the update rule of Adam-$\ell_2$. Yet, we are still lacking a complete explanation of the advantages of AdamW. In this paper, we tackle this question from both an optimization and an empirical point of view. First, we show how to re-interpret AdamW as an approximation of a proximal gradient method, which takes advantage of the closed-form proximal mapping of the regularizer instead of only utilizing its gradient information as in Adam-$\ell_2$. Next, we consider the property of "scale-freeness" enjoyed by AdamW and by its proximal counterpart: their updates are invariant to component-wise rescaling of the gradients. We provide empirical evidence across a wide range of deep learning experiments showing a correlation between the problems in which AdamW exhibits an advantage over Adam-$\ell_2$ and the degree to which we expect the gradients of the network to exhibit multiple scales, thus motivating the hypothesis that the advantage of AdamW could be due to the scale-free updates.

(2 min) Forgetting is often seen as an unwanted characteristic in both human and machine learning. However, we propose that forgetting can in fact be favorable to learning. We introduce "forget-and-relearn" as a powerful paradigm for shaping the learning trajectories of artificial neural networks. In this process, the forgetting step selectively removes undesirable information from the model, and the relearning step reinforces features that are consistently useful under different conditions. The forget-and-relearn framework unifies many existing iterative training algorithms in the image classification and language emergence literature, and allows us to understand the success of these algorithms in terms of the disproportionate forgetting of undesirable information. We leverage this understanding to improve upon existing algorithms by designing more targeted forgetting operations. Insights from our analysis provide a coherent view on the dynamics of iterative training in neural networks and offer a clear path towards performance improvements.

(0 min) A primary focus area in continual learning research is alleviating the "catastrophic forgetting" problem in neural networks by designing new algorithms that are more robust to the distribution shifts. While the recent progress in continual learning literature is encouraging, our understanding of what properties of neural networks contribute to catastrophic forgetting is still limited. To address this, instead of focusing on continual learning algorithms, in this work, we focus on the model itself and study the impact of "width" of the neural network architecture on catastrophic forgetting, and show that width has a surprisingly significant effect on forgetting. To explain this effect, we study the learning dynamics of the network from various perspectives such as gradient orthogonality, sparsity, and lazy training regime. We provide potential explanations that are consistent with the empirical results across different architectures and continual learning benchmarks.

(2 min) Despite their success, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance of the gradient estimate, which can result in unsatisfactory sample complexity. Recently, numerous variance-reduced extensions of policy gradient methods with provably better sample complexity and competitive numerical performance have been proposed. After a compact survey on some of the main variance-reduced REINFORCE-type methods, we propose ProbAbilistic Gradient Estimation for Policy Gradient (PAGE-PG), a novel loopless variance-reduced policy gradient method based on a probabilistic switch between two types of updates. Our method is inspired by the PAGE estimator for supervised learning and leverages importance sampling to obtain an unbiased gradient estimator. We show that PAGE-PG enjoys a $\mathcal{O}\left( \epsilon^{-3} \right)$ average sample complexity to reach an $\epsilon$-stationary solution, which matches the sample complexity of its most competitive counterparts under the same setting. A numerical evaluation confirms the competitive performance of our method on classical control tasks.

(2 min) Dense geometric matching is a challenging computer vision task, requiring accurate correspondences under extreme variations in viewpoint and illumination, even for low-texture regions. In this task, finding accurate global correspondences is essential for later refinement stages. The current learning based paradigm is to perform global fixed-size correlation, followed by flattening and convolution to predict correspondences. In this work, we consider the problem from a different perspective and propose to formulate global correspondence estimation as a continuous probabilistic regression task using deep kernels, yielding a novel approach to learning dense correspondences. Our full approach, \textbf{D}eep \textbf{K}ernelized \textbf{M}atching, achieves significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art on the competitive HPatches and YFCC100m benchmarks, and we dissect the gains of our contributions in a thorough ablation study.

(2 min) Message passing neural networks (MPNN) have seen a steep rise in popularity since their introduction as generalizations of convolutional neural networks to graph structured data, and are now considered state-of-the-art tools for solving a large variety of graph-focused problems. We study the generalization capabilities of MPNNs in graph classification. We assume that graphs of different classes are sampled from different random graph models. Based on this data distribution, we derive a non-asymptotic bound on the generalization gap between the empirical and statistical loss, that decreases to zero as the graphs become larger. This is proven by showing that a MPNN, applied on a graph, approximates the MPNN applied on the geometric model that the graph discretizes.

(2 min) Deep machine learning models are increasingly deployedin the wild for providing services to users. Adversaries maysteal the knowledge of these valuable models by trainingsubstitute models according to the inference results of thetargeted deployed models. Recent data-free model stealingmethods are shown effective to extract the knowledge of thetarget model without using real query examples, but they as-sume rich inference information, e.g., class probabilities andlogits. However, they are all based on competing generator-substitute networks and hence encounter training instability.In this paper we propose a data-free model stealing frame-work,MEGA, which is based on collaborative generator-substitute networks and only requires the target model toprovide label prediction for synthetic query examples. Thecore of our method is a model stealing optimization con-sisting of two collaborative models (i) the substitute modelwhich imitates the target model through the synthetic queryexamples and their inferred labels and (ii) the generatorwhich synthesizes images such that the confidence of thesubstitute model over each query example is maximized. Wepropose a novel coordinate descent training procedure andanalyze its convergence. We also empirically evaluate thetrained substitute model on three datasets and its applicationon black-box adversarial attacks. Our results show that theaccuracy of our trained substitute model and the adversarialattack success rate over it can be up to 33% and 40% higherthan state-of-the-art data-free black-box attacks.

(2 min) This paper presents a lightweight algorithm for feature extraction, classification of seven different emotions, and facial expression recognition in a real-time manner based on static images of the human face. In this regard, a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network is trained based on the foregoing algorithm. In order to classify human faces, first, some pre-processing is applied to the input image, which can localize and cut out faces from it. In the next step, a facial landmark detection library is used, which can detect the landmarks of each face. Then, the human face is split into upper and lower faces, which enables the extraction of the desired features from each part. In the proposed model, both geometric and texture-based feature types are taken into account. After the feature extraction phase, a normalized vector of features is created. A 3-layer MLP is trained using these feature vectors, leading to 96% accuracy on the test set.

(2 min) Neural language models are the backbone of modern-day natural language processing applications. Their use on textual heritage collections which have undergone Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is therefore also increasing. Nevertheless, our understanding of the impact OCR noise could have on language models is still limited. We perform an assessment of the impact OCR noise has on a variety of language models, using data in Dutch, English, French and German. We find that OCR noise poses a significant obstacle to language modelling, with language models increasingly diverging from their noiseless targets as OCR quality lowers. In the presence of small corpora, simpler models including PPMI and Word2Vec consistently outperform transformer-based models in this respect.

(0 min) Obtaining reliable, adaptive confidence sets for prediction functions (hypotheses) is a central challenge in sequential decision-making tasks, such as bandits and model-based reinforcement learning. These confidence sets typically rely on prior assumptions on the hypothesis space, e.g., the known kernel of a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Hand-designing such kernels is error prone, and misspecification may lead to poor or unsafe performance. In this work, we propose to meta-learn a kernel from offline data (Meta-KeL). For the case where the unknown kernel is a combination of known base kernels, we develop an estimator based on structured sparsity. Under mild conditions, we guarantee that our estimated RKHS yields valid confidence sets that, with increasing amounts of offline data, become as tight as those given the true unknown kernel. We demonstrate our approach on the kernelized bandit problem (a.k.a.~Bayesian optimization), where we establish regret bounds competitive with those given the true kernel. We also empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a Bayesian optimization task.

(0 min) In logistic regression, it is often desirable to utilize regularization to promote sparse solutions, particularly for problems with a large number of features compared to available labels. In this paper, we present screening rules that safely remove features from logistic regression with $\ell_0-\ell_2$ regularization before solving the problem. The proposed safe screening rules are based on lower bounds from the Fenchel dual of strong conic relaxations of the logistic regression problem. Numerical experiments with real and synthetic data suggest that a high percentage of the features can be effectively and safely removed apriori, leading to substantial speed-up in the computations.

(2 min) Local detection of magnetic fields is crucial for characterizing nano- and micro-materials and has been implemented using various scanning techniques or even diamond quantum sensors. Diamond nanoparticles (nanodiamonds) offer an attractive opportunity to chieve high spatial resolution because they can easily be close to the target within a few 10 nm simply by attaching them to its surface. A physical model for such a randomly oriented nanodiamond ensemble (NDE) is available, but the complexity of actual experimental conditions still limits the accuracy of deducing magnetic fields. Here, we demonstrate magnetic field imaging with high accuracy of 1.8 $\mu$T combining NDE and machine learning without any physical models. We also discover the field direction dependence of the NDE signal, suggesting the potential application for vector magnetometry and improvement of the existing model. Our method further enriches the performance of NDE to achieve the accuracy to visualize mesoscopic current and magnetism in atomic-layer materials and to expand the applicability in arbitrarily shaped materials, including living organisms. This achievement will bridge machine learning and quantum sensing for accurate measurements.

(0 min) In this work, we examine the robustness of state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms when applied to morphological classification in modern radio astronomy. We test whether SSL can achieve performance comparable to the current supervised state of the art when using many fewer labelled data points and if these results generalise to using truly unlabelled data. We find that although SSL provides additional regularisation, its performance degrades rapidly when using very few labels, and that using truly unlabelled data leads to a significant drop in performance.

(0 min) We tackle the problem of generating code snippets from natural language descriptions using the CoNaLa dataset. We use the self-attention based transformer architecture and show that it performs better than recurrent attention-based encoder decoder. Furthermore, we develop a modified form of back translation and use cycle consistent losses to train the model in an end-to-end fashion. We achieve a BLEU score of 16.99 beating the previously reported baseline of the CoNaLa challenge.

(0 min) The field of social robotics will likely need to depart from a paradigm of designed behaviours and imitation learning and adopt modern reinforcement learning (RL) methods to enable robots to interact fluidly and efficaciously with humans. In this paper, we present the Social Reward Function as a mechanism to provide (1) a real-time, dense reward function necessary for the deployment of RL agents in social robotics, and (2) a standardised objective metric for comparing the efficacy of different social robots. The Social Reward Function is designed to closely mimic those genetically endowed social perception capabilities of humans in an effort to provide a simple, stable and culture-agnostic reward function. Presently, datasets used in social robotics are either small or significantly out-of-domain with respect to social robotics. The use of the Social Reward Function will allow larger in-domain datasets to be collected close to the behaviour policy of social robots, which will allow both further improvements to reward functions and to the behaviour policies of social robots. We believe this will be the key enabler to developing efficacious social robots in the future.

(0 min) One of the easiest ways to diagnose cardiovascular conditions is Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. ECG databases usually have highly imbalanced distributions due to the abundance of Normal ECG and scarcity of abnormal cases which are equally, if not more, important for arrhythmia detection. As such, DL classifiers trained on these datasets usually perform poorly, especially on minor classes. One solution to address the imbalance is to generate realistic synthetic ECG signals mostly using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to augment and the datasets. In this study, we designed an experiment to investigate the impact of data augmentation on arrhythmia classification. Using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset, we employed two ways for ECG beats generation: (i) an unconditional GAN, i.e., Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) is trained on each class individually; (ii) a conditional GAN model, i.e., Auxiliary Classifier Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (AC-WGAN-GP) is trained on all the available classes to train one single generator. Two scenarios are defined for each case: i) unscreened where all the generated synthetic beats were used directly without any post-processing, and ii) screened where a portion of generated beats are selected based on their Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance with a designated template. A ResNet classifier is trained on each of the four augmented datasets and the performance metrics of precision, recall and F1-Score as well as the confusion matrices were compared with the reference case, i.e., when the classifier is trained on the imbalanced original dataset. The results show that in all four cases augmentation achieves impressive improvements in metrics particularly on minor classes (typically from 0 or 0.27 to 0.99). The quality of the generated beats is also evaluated using DTW distance function compared with real data.

(0 min) Knowledge distillation (KD), best known as an effective method for model compression, aims at transferring the knowledge of a bigger network (teacher) to a much smaller network (student). Conventional KD methods usually employ the teacher model trained in a supervised manner, where output labels are treated only as targets. Extending this supervised scheme further, we introduce a new type of teacher model for KD, namely Oracle Teacher, that utilizes the embeddings of both the source inputs and the output labels to extract a more accurate knowledge to be transferred to the student. One potential risk for the proposed approach is a trivial solution that the model's output directly copies the oracle input. In Oracle Teacher, we present a training scheme that can effectively prevent the trivial solution and thus enables utilizing both source inputs and oracle inputs for model training. Extensive experiments are conducted on three different sequence learning tasks: speech recognition, scene text recognition, and machine translation. From the experimental results, we empirically show that the proposed model improves the students across these tasks while achieving a considerable speed-up in the teacher model's training time.

(0 min) Facial recognition tools are becoming exceptionally accurate in identifying people from images. However, this comes at the cost of privacy for users of online services with photo management (e.g. social media platforms). Particularly troubling is the ability to leverage unsupervised learning to recognize faces even when the user has not labeled their images. In this paper we propose Ulixes, a strategy to generate visually non-invasive facial noise masks that yield adversarial examples, preventing the formation of identifiable user clusters in the embedding space of facial encoders. This is applicable even when a user is unmasked and labeled images are available online. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Ulixes by showing that various classification and clustering methods cannot reliably label the adversarial examples we generate. We also study the effects of Ulixes in various black-box settings and compare it to the current state of the art in adversarial machine learning. Finally, we challenge the effectiveness of Ulixes against adversarially trained models and show that it is robust to countermeasures.

(0 min) High-performance deep neural network (DNN)-based systems are in high demand in edge environments. Due to its high computational complexity, it is challenging to deploy DNNs on edge devices with strict limitations on computational resources. In this paper, we derive a compact while highly-accurate DNN model, termed dsODENet, by combining recently-proposed parameter reduction techniques: Neural ODE (Ordinary Differential Equation) and DSC (Depthwise Separable Convolution). Neural ODE exploits a similarity between ResNet and ODE, and shares most of weight parameters among multiple layers, which greatly reduces the memory consumption. We apply dsODENet to a domain adaptation as a practical use case with image classification datasets. We also propose a resource-efficient FPGA-based design for dsODENet, where all the parameters and feature maps except for pre- and post-processing layers can be mapped onto on-chip memories. It is implemented on Xilinx ZCU104 board and evaluated in terms of domain adaptation accuracy, training speed, FPGA resource utilization, and speedup rate compared to a software counterpart. The results demonstrate that dsODENet achieves comparable or slightly better domain adaptation accuracy compared to our baseline Neural ODE implementation, while the total parameter size without pre- and post-processing layers is reduced by 54.2% to 79.8%. Our FPGA implementation accelerates the inference speed by 27.9 times.

(0 min) Explaining the decisions of black-box models is a central theme in the study of trustworthy ML. Numerous measures have been proposed in the literature; however, none of them take an axiomatic approach to causal explainability. In this work, we propose three explanation measures which aggregate the set of all but-for causes -- a necessary and sufficient explanation -- into feature importance weights. Our first measure is a natural adaptation of Chockler and Halpern's notion of causal responsibility, whereas the other two correspond to existing game-theoretic influence measures. We present an axiomatic treatment for our proposed indices, showing that they can be uniquely characterized by a set of desirable properties. We also extend our approach to derive a new method to compute the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices for black-box model explanations. Finally, we analyze and compare the necessity and sufficiency of all our proposed explanation measures in practice using the Adult-Income dataset. Thus, our work is the first to formally bridge the gap between model explanations, game-theoretic influence, and causal analysis.

(0 min) Stacking Gaussian Processes severely diminishes the model's ability to detect outliers, which when combined with non-zero mean functions, further extrapolates low non-parametric variance to low training data density regions. We propose a hybrid kernel inspired from Varifold theory, operating in both Euclidean and Wasserstein space. We posit that directly taking into account the variance in the computation of Wasserstein-2 distances is of key importance towards maintaining outlier status throughout the hierarchy. We show improved performance on medium and large scale datasets and enhanced out-of-distribution detection on both toy and real data.

(0 min) Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a specification language for finite sequences (called traces) widely used in program verification, motion planning in robotics, process mining, and many other areas. We consider the problem of learning LTL formulas for classifying traces; despite a growing interest of the research community, existing solutions suffer from two limitations: they do not scale beyond small formulas, and they may exhaust computational resources without returning any result. We introduce a new algorithm addressing both issues: our algorithm is able to construct formulas an order of magnitude larger than previous methods, and it is anytime, meaning that it in most cases successfully outputs a formula, albeit possibly not of minimal size. We evaluate the performances of our algorithm using an open source implementation against publicly available benchmarks.

(0 min) Despite our best efforts, deep learning models remain highly vulnerable to even tiny adversarial perturbations applied to the inputs. The ability to extract information from solely the output of a machine learning model to craft adversarial perturbations to black-box models is a practical threat against real-world systems, such as autonomous cars or machine learning models exposed as a service (MLaaS). Of particular interest are sparse attacks. The realization of sparse attacks in black-box models demonstrates that machine learning models are more vulnerable than we believe. Because these attacks aim to minimize the number of perturbed pixels measured by l_0 norm-required to mislead a model by solely observing the decision (the predicted label) returned to a model query; the so-called decision-based attack setting. But, such an attack leads to an NP-hard optimization problem. We develop an evolution-based algorithm-SparseEvo-for the problem and evaluate against both convolutional deep neural networks and vision transformers. Notably, vision transformers are yet to be investigated under a decision-based attack setting. SparseEvo requires significantly fewer model queries than the state-of-the-art sparse attack Pointwise for both untargeted and targeted attacks. The attack algorithm, although conceptually simple, is also competitive with only a limited query budget against the state-of-the-art gradient-based whitebox attacks in standard computer vision tasks such as ImageNet. Importantly, the query efficient SparseEvo, along with decision-based attacks, in general, raise new questions regarding the safety of deployed systems and poses new directions to study and understand the robustness of machine learning models.

(0 min) Identifying vulnerabilities in the source code is essential to protect the software systems from cyber security attacks. It, however, is also a challenging step that requires specialized expertise in security and code representation. To this end, we aim to develop a general, practical, and programming language-independent model capable of running on various source codes and libraries without difficulty. Therefore, we consider vulnerability detection as an inductive text classification problem and propose ReGVD, a simple yet effective graph neural network-based model for the problem. In particular, ReGVD views each raw source code as a flat sequence of tokens to build a graph, wherein node features are initialized by only the token embedding layer of a pre-trained programming language (PL) model. ReGVD then leverages residual connection among GNN layers and examines a mixture of graph-level sum and max poolings to return a graph embedding for the source code. Experimental results demonstrate that ReGVD outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models and obtains the highest accuracy on the real-world benchmark dataset from CodeXGLUE for vulnerability detection. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/daiquocnguyen/GNN-ReGVD}.

(0 min) We present a conceptual framework, datamodeling, for analyzing the behavior of a model class in terms of the training data. For any fixed "target" example $x$, training set $S$, and learning algorithm, a datamodel is a parameterized function $2^S \to \mathbb{R}$ that for any subset of $S' \subset S$ -- using only information about which examples of $S$ are contained in $S'$ -- predicts the outcome of training a model on $S'$ and evaluating on $x$. Despite the potential complexity of the underlying process being approximated (e.g., end-to-end training and evaluation of deep neural networks), we show that even simple linear datamodels can successfully predict model outputs. We then demonstrate that datamodels give rise to a variety of applications, such as: accurately predicting the effect of dataset counterfactuals; identifying brittle predictions; finding semantically similar examples; quantifying train-test leakage; and embedding data into a well-behaved and feature-rich representation space. Data for this paper (including pre-computed datamodels as well as raw predictions from four million trained deep neural networks) is available at https://github.com/MadryLab/datamodels-data .

(0 min) For active impulsive noise control, a filtered-x recursive least $p$-power (FxRLP) algorithm is proposed by minimizing the weighted summation of the $p$-power of the \emph{a posteriori} errors. Since the characteristic of the target noise is investigated, the FxRLP algorithm achieves good performance and robustness. To obtain a better performance, we develop a filtered-x logarithmic recursive least $p$-power (FxlogRLP) algorithm which integrates the $p$-order moment with the logarithmic-order moment. Simulation results demonstrate that the FxlogRLP algorithm is superior to the existing algorithms in terms of convergence rate and noise reduction.

(0 min) In recent times Mechanical and Production industries are facing increasing challenges related to the shift toward sustainable manufacturing. In this article, machining was performed in dry cutting condition with a newly developed coated insert called AlTiSiN coated carbides coated through scalable pulsed power plasma technique in dry cutting condition and a dataset was generated for different machining parameters and output responses. The machining parameters are speed, feed, depth of cut and the output responses are surface roughness, cutting force, crater wear length, crater wear width, and flank wear. The data collected from the machining operation is used for the development of machine learning (ML) based surrogate models to test, evaluate and optimize various input machining parameters. Different ML approaches such as polynomial regression (PR), random forest (RF) regression, gradient boosted (GB) trees, and adaptive boosting (AB) based regression are used to model different output responses in the hard machining of AISI D6 steel. The surrogate models for different output responses are used to prepare a complex objective function for the germinal center algorithm-based optimization of the machining parameters of the hard turning operation.

(0 min) While extensive-form games (EFGs) can be converted into normal-form games (NFGs), doing so comes at the cost of an exponential blowup of the strategy space. So, progress on NFGs and EFGs has historically followed separate tracks, with the EFG community often having to catch up with advances (e.g., last-iterate convergence and predictive regret bounds) from the larger NFG community. In this paper we show that the Optimistic Multiplicative Weights Update (OMWU) algorithm -- the premier learning algorithm for NFGs -- can be simulated on the normal-form equivalent of an EFG in linear time per iteration in the game tree size using a kernel trick. The resulting algorithm, Kernelized OMWU (KOMWU), applies more broadly to all convex games whose strategy space is a polytope with 0/1 integral vertices, as long as the kernel can be evaluated efficiently. In the particular case of EFGs, KOMWU closes several standing gaps between NFG and EFG learning, by enabling direct, black-box transfer to EFGs of desirable properties of learning dynamics that were so far known to be achievable only in NFGs. Specifically, KOMWU gives the first algorithm that guarantees at the same time last-iterate convergence, lower dependence on the size of the game tree than all prior algorithms, and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1)$ regret when followed by all players.

(0 min) Biophysical signals such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Photoplethysmogram (PPG) are key to the sensing of vital parameters for wellbeing. Coincidentally, ECG and PPG are signals, which provide a "different window" into the same phenomena, namely the cardiac cycle. While they are used separately, there are no studies regarding the exact correction of the different ECG and PPG events. Such correlation would be helpful in many fronts such as sensor fusion for improved accuracy using cheaper sensors and attack detection and mitigation methods using multiple signals to enhance the robustness, for example. Considering this, we present the first approach in formally establishing the key relationships between ECG and PPG signals. We combine formal run-time monitoring with statistical analysis and regression analysis for our results.

(0 min) In this work we propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, ISNet, to solve the task of image segmentation followed by classification, substituting the common pipeline of two networks by a single model. We designed the ISNet for high flexibility and performance: it allows virtually any classification neural network architecture to analyze a common image as if it had been previously segmented. Furthermore, in relation to the original classifier, the ISNet does not cause any increment in computational cost or architectural changes at run-time. To accomplish this, we introduce the concept of optimizing DNNs for relevance segmentation in heatmaps created by Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which proves to be equivalent to the classification of previously segmented images. We apply an ISNet based on a DenseNet121 classifier to solve the task of COVID-19 detection in chest X-rays. We compare the model to a U-net (performing lung segmentation) followed by a DenseNet121, and to a standalone DenseNet121. Due to the implicit segmentation, the ISNet precisely ignored the X-ray regions outside of the lungs; it achieved 94.5 +/-4.1% mean accuracy with an external database, showing strong generalization capability and surpassing the other models' performances by 6 to 7.9%. ISNet presents a fast and light methodology to perform classification preceded by segmentation, while also being more accurate than standard pipelines.

(0 min) We propose a unified framework to study policy evaluation (PE) and the associated temporal difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space. We show that PE is equivalent to maintaining the martingale condition of a process. From this perspective, we find that the mean--square TD error approximates the quadratic variation of the martingale and thus is not a suitable objective for PE. We present two methods to use the martingale characterization for designing PE algorithms. The first one minimizes a "martingale loss function", whose solution is proved to be the best approximation of the true value function in the mean--square sense. This method interprets the classical gradient Monte-Carlo algorithm. The second method is based on a system of equations called the "martingale orthogonality conditions" with test functions. Solving these equations in different ways recovers various classical TD algorithms, such as TD($\lambda$), LSTD, and GTD. Different choices of test functions determine in what sense the resulting solutions approximate the true value function. Moreover, we prove that any convergent time-discretized algorithm converges to its continuous-time counterpart as the mesh size goes to zero, and we provide the convergence rate. We demonstrate the theoretical results and corresponding algorithms with numerical experiments and applications.

(0 min) We present BRIEE (Block-structured Representation learning with Interleaved Explore Exploit), an algorithm for efficient reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with block-structured dynamics (i.e., Block MDPs), where rich observations are generated from a set of unknown latent states. BRIEE interleaves latent states discovery, exploration, and exploitation together, and can provably learn a near-optimal policy with sample complexity scaling polynomially in the number of latent states, actions, and the time horizon, with no dependence on the size of the potentially infinite observation space. Empirically, we show that BRIEE is more sample efficient than the state-of-art Block MDP algorithm HOMER and other empirical RL baselines on challenging rich-observation combination lock problems that require deep exploration.

(0 min) In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it induces. We study the problem of finding near-optimal models under performativity while maintaining low regret. On the surface, this problem might seem equivalent to a bandit problem. However, it exhibits a fundamentally richer feedback structure that we refer to as performative feedback: after every deployment, the learner receives samples from the shifted distribution rather than only bandit feedback about the reward. Our main contribution is regret bounds that scale only with the complexity of the distribution shifts and not that of the reward function. The key algorithmic idea is careful exploration of the distribution shifts that informs a novel construction of confidence bounds on the risk of unexplored models. The construction only relies on smoothness of the shifts and does not assume convexity. More broadly, our work establishes a conceptual approach for leveraging tools from the bandits literature for the purpose of regret minimization with performative feedback.

(0 min) In this paper, we question the rationale behind propagating large numbers of parameters through a distributed system during federated learning. We start by examining the rank characteristics of the subspace spanned by gradients across epochs (i.e., the gradient-space) in centralized model training, and observe that this gradient-space often consists of a few leading principal components accounting for an overwhelming majority (95-99%) of the explained variance. Motivated by this, we propose the "Look-back Gradient Multiplier" (LBGM) algorithm, which exploits this low-rank property to enable gradient recycling between model update rounds of federated learning, reducing transmissions of large parameters to single scalars for aggregation. We analytically characterize the convergence behavior of LBGM, revealing the nature of the trade-off between communication savings and model performance. Our subsequent experimental results demonstrate the improvement LBGM obtains in communication overhead compared to conventional federated learning on several datasets and deep learning models. Additionally, we show that LBGM is a general plug-and-play algorithm that can be used standalone or stacked on top of existing sparsification techniques for distributed model training.

(0 min) Text normalization, or the process of transforming text into a consistent, canonical form, is crucial for speech applications such as text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). In TTS, the system must decide whether to verbalize "1995" as "nineteen ninety five" in "born in 1995" or as "one thousand nine hundred ninety five" in "page 1995". We present an experimental comparison of various Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models of text normalization for speech and evaluate them on a variety of datasets of written text aligned to its normalized spoken form. These models include variants of the 2-stage RNN-based tagging/seq2seq architecture introduced by Zhang et al. (2019), where we replace the RNN with a Transformer in one or more stages, as well as vanilla Transformers that output string representations of edit sequences. Of our approaches, using Transformers for sentence context encoding within the 2-stage model proved most effective, with the fine-tuned BERT encoder yielding the best performance.

(0 min) What is the best way to exploit extra data -- be it unlabeled data from the same task, or labeled data from a related task -- to learn a given task? This paper formalizes the question using the theory of reference priors. Reference priors are objective, uninformative Bayesian priors that maximize the mutual information between the task and the weights of the model. Such priors enable the task to maximally affect the Bayesian posterior, e.g., reference priors depend upon the number of samples available for learning the task and for very small sample sizes, the prior puts more probability mass on low-complexity models in the hypothesis space. This paper presents the first demonstration of reference priors for medium-scale deep networks and image-based data. We develop generalizations of reference priors and demonstrate applications to two problems. First, by using unlabeled data to compute the reference prior, we develop new Bayesian semi-supervised learning methods that remain effective even with very few samples per class. Second, by using labeled data from the source task to compute the reference prior, we develop a new pretraining method for transfer learning that allows data from the target task to maximally affect the Bayesian posterior. Empirical validation of these methods is conducted on image classification datasets.

(0 min) Video compression is a central feature of the modern internet powering technologies from social media to video conferencing. While video compression continues to mature, for many, and particularly for extreme, compression settings, quality loss is still noticeable. These extreme settings nevertheless have important applications to the efficient transmission of videos over bandwidth constrained or otherwise unstable connections. In this work, we develop a deep learning architecture capable of restoring detail to compressed videos which leverages the underlying structure and motion information embedded in the video bitstream. We show that this improves restoration accuracy compared to prior compression correction methods and is competitive when compared with recent deep-learning-based video compression methods on rate-distortion while achieving higher throughput.

(0 min) Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies especially in the western world (e.g., 48% of Europeans use social media every day or almost every day). Platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agenda aiming to influence voter behaviour. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets from politicians from different countries and explore if their tweets follow the same trend. Utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models we performed sentiment analysis on multilingual tweets collected from members of parliament of Greece, Spain and United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting trends in the intersection of sentiment and popularity.

(0 min) A key challenge of supervised learning is the availability of human-labeled data. We evaluate a big data processing pipeline to auto-generate labels for remote sensing data. It is based on rasterized statistical features extracted from surveys such as e.g. LiDAR measurements. Using simple combinations of the rasterized statistical layers, it is demonstrated that multiple classes can be generated at accuracies of ~0.9. As proof of concept, we utilize the big geo-data platform IBM PAIRS to dynamically generate such labels in dense urban areas with multiple land cover classes. The general method proposed here is platform independent, and it can be adapted to generate labels for other satellite modalities in order to enable machine learning on overhead imagery for land use classification and object detection.

(0 min) Many real-world applications adopt multi-label data streams as the need for algorithms to deal with rapidly changing data increases. Changes in data distribution, also known as concept drift, cause the existing classification models to rapidly lose their effectiveness. To assist the classifiers, we propose a novel algorithm called Label Dependency Drift Detector (LD3), an implicit (unsupervised) concept drift detector using label dependencies within the data for multi-label data streams. Our study exploits the dynamic temporal dependencies between labels using a label influence ranking method, which leverages a data fusion algorithm and uses the produced ranking to detect concept drift. LD3 is the first unsupervised concept drift detection algorithm in the multi-label classification problem area. In this study, we perform an extensive evaluation of LD3 by comparing it with 14 prevalent supervised concept drift detection algorithms that we adapt to the problem area using 12 datasets and a baseline classifier. The results show that LD3 provides between 19.8\% and 68.6\% better predictive performance than comparable detectors on both real-world and synthetic data streams.

(0 min) Commonsense causality reasoning (CCR) aims at identifying plausible causes and effects in natural language descriptions that are deemed reasonable by an average person. Although being of great academic and practical interest, this problem is still shadowed by the lack of a well-posed theoretical framework; existing work usually relies on deep language models wholeheartedly, and is potentially susceptible to confounding co-occurrences. Motivated by classical causal principles, we articulate the central question of CCR and draw parallels between human subjects in observational studies and natural languages to adopt CCR to the potential-outcomes framework, which is the first such attempt for commonsense tasks. We propose a novel framework, ROCK, to Reason O(A)bout Commonsense K(C)ausality, which utilizes temporal signals as incidental supervision, and balances confounding effects using temporal propensities that are analogous to propensity scores. The ROCK implementation is modular and zero-shot, and demonstrates good CCR capabilities on various datasets.

(2 min) In distributional reinforcement learning not only expected returns but the complete return distributions of a policy is taken into account. The return distribution for a fixed policy is given as the fixed point of an associated distributional Bellman operator. In this note we consider general distributional Bellman operators and study existence and uniqueness of its fixed points as well as their tail properties. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of return distributions and identify cases of regular variation. We link distributional Bellman equations to multivariate distributional equations of the form $\textbf{X} =_d \textbf{A}\textbf{X} + \textbf{B}$, where $\textbf{X}$ and $\textbf{B}$ are $d$-dimensional random vectors, $\textbf{A}$ a random $d\times d$ matrix and $\textbf{X}$ and $(\textbf{A},\textbf{B})$ are independent. We show that any fixed-point of a distributional Bellman operator can be obtained as the vector of marginal laws of a solution to such a multivariate distributional equation. This makes the general theory of such equations applicable to the distributional reinforcement learning setting.

(0 min) The characterization of an exoplanet's interior is an inverse problem, which requires statistical methods such as Bayesian inference in order to be solved. Current methods employ Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to infer the posterior probability of planetary structure parameters for a given exoplanet. These methods are time consuming since they require the calculation of a large number of planetary structure models. To speed up the inference process when characterizing an exoplanet, we propose to use conditional invertible neural networks (cINNs) to calculate the posterior probability of the internal structure parameters. cINNs are a special type of neural network which excel in solving inverse problems. We constructed a cINN using FrEIA, which was then trained on a database of $5.6\cdot 10^6$ internal structure models to recover the inverse mapping between internal structure parameters and observable features (i.e., planetary mass, planetary radius and composition of the host star). The cINN method was compared to a Metropolis-Hastings MCMC. For that we repeated the characterization of the exoplanet K2-111 b, using both the MCMC method and the trained cINN. We show that the inferred posterior probability of the internal structure parameters from both methods are very similar, with the biggest differences seen in the exoplanet's water content. Thus cINNs are a possible alternative to the standard time-consuming sampling methods. Indeed, using cINNs allows for orders of magnitude faster inference of an exoplanet's composition than what is possible using an MCMC method, however, it still requires the computation of a large database of internal structures to train the cINN. Since this database is only computed once, we found that using a cINN is more efficient than an MCMC, when more than 10 exoplanets are characterized using the same cINN.

(0 min) While deep neural networks (DNNs) have become a standard architecture for many machine learning tasks, their internal decision-making process and general interpretability is still poorly understood. Conversely, common decision trees are easily interpretable and theoretically well understood. We show that by encoding the discrete sample activation values of nodes as a binary representation, we are able to extract a decision tree explaining the classification procedure of each layer in a ReLU-activated multilayer perceptron (MLP). We then combine these decision trees with existing feature attribution techniques in order to produce an interpretation of each layer of a model. Finally, we provide an analysis of the generated interpretations, the behaviour of the binary encodings and how these relate to sample groupings created during the training process of the neural network.

(0 min) Optimizers like Adam and AdaGrad have been very successful in training large-scale neural networks. Yet, the performance of these methods is heavily dependent on a carefully tuned learning rate schedule. We show that in many large-scale applications, augmenting a given optimizer with an adaptive tuning method of the step-size greatly improves the performance. More precisely, we maintain a global step-size scale for the update as well as a gain factor for each coordinate. We adjust the global scale based on the alignment of the average gradient and the current gradient vectors. A similar approach is used for updating the local gain factors. This type of step-size scale tuning has been done before with gradient descent updates. In this paper, we update the step-size scale and the gain variables with exponentiated gradient updates instead. Experimentally, we show that our approach can achieve compelling accuracy on standard models without using any specially tuned learning rate schedule. We also show the effectiveness of our approach for quickly adapting to distribution shifts in the data during training.

(2 min) The recent growth of emergent network applications (e.g., satellite networks, vehicular networks) is increasing the complexity of managing modern communication networks. As a result, the community proposed the Digital Twin Networks (DTN) as a key enabler of efficient network management. Network operators can leverage the DTN to perform different optimization tasks (e.g., Traffic Engineering, Network Planning). Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) showed a high performance when applied to solve network optimization problems. In the context of DTN, DRL can be leveraged to solve optimization problems without directly impacting the real-world network behavior. However, DRL scales poorly with the problem size and complexity. In this paper, we explore the use of Evolutionary Strategies (ES) to train DRL agents for solving a routing optimization problem. The experimental results show that ES achieved a training time speed-up of 128 and 6 for the NSFNET and GEANT2 topologies respectively.

(2 min) Learning is a distinctive feature of intelligent behaviour. High-throughput experimental data and Big Data promise to open new windows on complex systems such as cells, the brain or our societies. Yet, the puzzling success of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning shows that we still have a poor conceptual understanding of learning. These applications push statistical inference into uncharted territories where data is high-dimensional and scarce, and prior information on "true" models is scant if not totally absent. Here we review recent progress on understanding learning, based on the notion of "relevance". The relevance, as we define it here, quantifies the amount of information that a dataset or the internal representation of a learning machine contains on the generative model of the data. This allows us to define maximally informative samples, on one hand, and optimal learning machines on the other. These are ideal limits of samples and of machines, that contain the maximal amount of information about the unknown generative process, at a given resolution (or level of compression). Both ideal limits exhibit critical features in the statistical sense: Maximally informative samples are characterised by a power-law frequency distribution (statistical criticality) and optimal learning machines by an anomalously large susceptibility. The trade-off between resolution (i.e. compression) and relevance distinguishes the regime of noisy representations from that of lossy compression. These are separated by a special point characterised by Zipf's law statistics. This identifies samples obeying Zipf's law as the most compressed loss-less representations that are optimal in the sense of maximal relevance. Criticality in optimal learning machines manifests in an exponential degeneracy of energy levels, that leads to unusual thermodynamic properties.

(2 min) We study regret minimization for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under cost constraints. We start by designing a policy optimization algorithm with carefully designed action-value estimator and bonus term, and show that for ergodic MDPs, our algorithm ensures $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret and constant constraint violation, where $T$ is the total number of time steps. This strictly improves over the algorithm of (Singh et al., 2020), whose regret and constraint violation are both $\widetilde{O}(T^{2/3})$. Next, we consider the most general class of weakly communicating MDPs. Through a finite-horizon approximation, we develop another algorithm with $\widetilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret and constraint violation, which can be further improved to $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ via a simple modification, albeit making the algorithm computationally inefficient. As far as we know, these are the first set of provable algorithms for weakly communicating MDPs with cost constraints.

(2 min) The massive growth of social media usage has witnessed a tsunami of online toxicity in teams of hate speech, abusive posts, cyberbullying, etc. Detecting online toxicity is challenging due to its inherent subjectivity. Factors such as the context of the speech, geography, socio-political climate, and background of the producers and consumers of the posts play a crucial role in determining if the content can be flagged as toxic. Adoption of automated toxicity detection models in production can lead to a sidelining of the various demographic and psychographic groups they aim to help in the first place. It has piqued researchers' interest in examining unintended biases and their mitigation. Due to the nascent and multi-faceted nature of the work, complete literature is chaotic in its terminologies, techniques, and findings. In this paper, we put together a systematic study to discuss the limitations and challenges of existing methods. We start by developing a taxonomy for categorising various unintended biases and a suite of evaluation metrics proposed to quantify such biases. We take a closer look at each proposed method for evaluating and mitigating bias in toxic speech detection. To examine the limitations of existing methods, we also conduct a case study to introduce the concept of bias shift due to knowledge-based bias mitigation methods. The survey concludes with an overview of the critical challenges, research gaps and future directions. While reducing toxicity on online platforms continues to be an active area of research, a systematic study of various biases and their mitigation strategies will help the research community produce robust and fair models.

(0 min) Studies of active learning traditionally assume the target and source data stem from a single domain. However, in realistic applications, practitioners often require active learning with multiple sources of out-of-distribution data, where it is unclear a priori which data sources will help or hurt the target domain. We survey a wide variety of techniques in active learning (AL), domain shift detection (DS), and multi-domain sampling to examine this challenging setting for question answering and sentiment analysis. We ask (1) what family of methods are effective for this task? And, (2) what properties of selected examples and domains achieve strong results? Among 18 acquisition functions from 4 families of methods, we find H- Divergence methods, and particularly our proposed variant DAL-E, yield effective results, averaging 2-3% improvements over the random baseline. We also show the importance of a diverse allocation of domains, as well as room-for-improvement of existing methods on both domain and example selection. Our findings yield the first comprehensive analysis of both existing and novel methods for practitioners faced with multi-domain active learning for natural language tasks.

(2 min) Content-addressable memory (CAM) networks, so-called because stored items can be recalled by partial or corrupted versions of the items, exhibit near-perfect recall of a small number of information-dense patterns below capacity and a `memory cliff' beyond, such that inserting a single additional pattern results in catastrophic forgetting of all stored patterns. We propose a novel ANN architecture, Memory Scaffold with Heteroassociation (MESH), that gracefully trades-off pattern richness with pattern number to generate a CAM continuum without a memory cliff: Small numbers of patterns are stored with complete information recovery matching standard CAMs, while inserting more patterns still results in partial recall of every pattern, with an information per pattern that scales inversely with the number of patterns. Motivated by the architecture of the Entorhinal-Hippocampal memory circuit in the brain, MESH is a tripartite architecture with pairwise interactions that uses a predetermined set of internally stabilized states together with heteroassociation between the internal states and arbitrary external patterns. We show analytically and experimentally that MESH nearly saturates the total information bound (given by the number of synapses) for CAM networks, invariant of the number of stored patterns, outperforming all existing CAM models.

(2 min) Dementia is a highly heterogeneous neurodegenerative disorder. Differences in brain pathologies lead to significant variations in the clinical presentation and progression course of patients, increasing the need for individual progression predictions. Unsupervised cluster analysis on a dementia clinic population using the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) component scores uncovered subtypes with different risk of dementia progression. The distribution of the CDR components provide validation and interpretability regarding the cognitive characteristics of the identified subtypes.

(2 min) Recovering global rankings from pairwise comparisons is an important problem with many applications, ranging from time synchronization to sports team ranking. Pairwise comparisons corresponding to matches in a competition can naturally be construed as edges in a directed graph (digraph), whose nodes represent competitors with an unknown rank or skill strength. However, existing methods addressing the rank estimation problem have thus far not utilized powerful neural network architectures to optimize ranking objectives. Hence, we propose to augment an algorithm with neural network, in particular graph neural network (GNN) for its coherence to the problem at hand. In this paper, we introduce GNNRank, a modeling framework that is compatible with any GNN capable of learning digraph embeddings, and we devise trainable objectives to encode ranking upsets/violations. This framework includes a ranking score estimation approach, and adds a useful inductive bias by unfolding the Fiedler vector computation of the graph constructed from a learnable similarity matrix. Experimental results on a wide range of data sets show that our methods attain competitive and often superior performance compared with existing approaches. It also shows promising transfer ability to new data based on the trained GNN model.

(2 min) A large body of research in continual learning is devoted to overcoming the catastrophic forgetting of neural networks by designing new algorithms that are robust to the distribution shifts. However, the majority of these works are strictly focused on the "algorithmic" part of continual learning for a "fixed neural network architecture", and the implications of using different architectures are mostly neglected. Even the few existing continual learning methods that modify the model assume a fixed architecture and aim to develop an algorithm that efficiently uses the model throughout the learning experience. However, in this work, we show that the choice of architecture can significantly impact the continual learning performance, and different architectures lead to different trade-offs between the ability to remember previous tasks and learning new ones. Moreover, we study the impact of various architectural decisions, and our findings entail best practices and recommendations that can improve the continual learning performance.

(2 min) Text representations learned by machine learning models often encode undesirable demographic information of the user. Predictive models based on these representations can rely on such information resulting in biased decisions. We present a novel debiasing technique Fairness-aware Rate Maximization (FaRM), that removes demographic information by making representations of instances belonging to the same protected attribute class uncorrelated using the rate-distortion function. FaRM is able to debias representations with or without a target task at hand. FaRM can also be adapted to simultaneously remove information about multiple protected attributes. Empirical evaluations show that FaRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets, and learned representations leak significantly less protected attribute information against an attack by a non-linear probing network.

(2 min) Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a great potential in a variety of graph-based applications, such as recommender systems, drug discovery, and object recognition. Nevertheless, resource-efficient GNN learning is a rarely explored topic despite its many benefits for edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. To improve this state of affairs, this work proposes efficient subgraph-level training via resource-aware graph partitioning (SUGAR). SUGAR first partitions the initial graph into a set of disjoint subgraphs and then performs local training at the subgraph-level. We provide a theoretical analysis and conduct extensive experiments on five graph benchmarks to verify its efficacy in practice. Our results show that SUGAR can achieve up to 33 times runtime speedup and 3.8 times memory reduction on large-scale graphs. We believe SUGAR opens a new research direction towards developing GNN methods that are resource-efficient, hence suitable for IoT deployment.

(2 min) Interacting particle systems play a key role in science and engineering. Access to the governing particle interaction law is fundamental for a complete understanding of such systems. However, the inherent system complexity keeps the particle interaction hidden in many cases. Machine learning methods have the potential to learn the behavior of interacting particle systems by combining experiments with data analysis methods. However, most existing algorithms focus on learning the kinetics at the particle level. Learning pairwise interaction, e.g., pairwise force or pairwise potential energy, remains an open challenge. Here, we propose an algorithm that adapts the Graph Networks framework, which contains an edge part to learn the pairwise interaction and a node part to model the dynamics at particle level. Different from existing approaches that use neural networks in both parts, we design a deterministic operator in the node part. The designed physics operator on the nodes restricts the output space of the edge neural network to be exactly the pairwise interaction. We test the proposed methodology on multiple datasets and demonstrate that it achieves considerably better performance in inferring correctly the pairwise interactions while also being consistent with the underlying physics on all the datasets than existing purely data-driven models. The developed methodology can support a better understanding and discovery of the underlying particle interaction laws, and hence guide the design of materials with targeted properties.

(2 min) In this work, we propose an interesting method that aims to approximate an activation function over some domain by polynomials of the presupposing low degree. The main idea behind this method can be seen as an extension of the ordinary least square method and includes the gradient of activation function into the cost function to minimize.

(2 min) Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the promise of providing data-driven support for decision-making in a wide range of problems in healthcare, education, business, and other domains. Classical RL methods focus on the mean of the total return and, thus, may provide misleading results in the setting of the heterogeneous populations that commonly underlie large-scale datasets. We introduce the K-Heterogeneous Markov Decision Process (K-Hetero MDP) to address sequential decision problems with population heterogeneity. We propose the Auto-Clustered Policy Evaluation (ACPE) for estimating the value of a given policy, and the Auto-Clustered Policy Iteration (ACPI) for estimating the optimal policy in a given policy class. Our auto-clustered algorithms can automatically detect and identify homogeneous sub-populations, while estimating the Q function and the optimal policy for each sub-population. We establish convergence rates and construct confidence intervals for the estimators obtained by the ACPE and ACPI. We present simulations to support our theoretical findings, and we conduct an empirical study on the standard MIMIC-III dataset. The latter analysis shows evidence of value heterogeneity and confirms the advantages of our new method.

(2 min) Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a popular approach for various applications, ranging from social network analysis to modeling chemical properties of molecules. While GNNs often show remarkable performance on public datasets, they can struggle to learn long-range dependencies in the data due to over-smoothing and over-squashing tendencies. To alleviate this challenge, we propose PCAPass, a method which combines Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and message passing for generating node embeddings in an unsupervised manner and leverages gradient boosted decision trees for classification tasks. We show empirically that this approach provides competitive performance compared to popular GNNs on node classification benchmarks, while gathering information from longer distance neighborhoods. Our research demonstrates that applying dimensionality reduction with message passing and skip connections is a promising mechanism for aggregating long-range dependencies in graph structured data.

(2 min) We describe a graph-based neural acceleration technique for nonnegative matrix factorization that builds upon a connection between matrices and bipartite graphs that is well-known in certain fields, e.g., sparse linear algebra, but has not yet been exploited to design graph neural networks for matrix computations. We first consider low-rank factorization more broadly and propose a graph representation of the problem suited for graph neural networks. Then, we focus on the task of nonnegative matrix factorization and propose a graph neural network that interleaves bipartite self-attention layers with updates based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. Our empirical evaluation on synthetic and two real-world datasets shows that we attain substantial acceleration, even though we only train in an unsupervised fashion on smaller synthetic instances.

(2 min) Bayesian Optimization is a very effective tool for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Inspired by applications developing and characterizing reaction chemistry using droplet microfluidic reactors, we consider a novel setting where the expense of evaluating the function can increase significantly when making large input changes between iterations. We further assume we are working asynchronously, meaning we have to decide on new queries before we finish evaluating previous experiments. This paper investigates the problem and introduces 'Sequential Bayesian Optimization via Adaptive Connecting Samples' (SnAKe), which provides a solution by considering future queries and preemptively building optimization paths that minimize input costs. We investigate some convergence properties and empirically show that the algorithm is able to achieve regret similar to classical Bayesian Optimization algorithms in both the synchronous and asynchronous settings, while reducing the input costs significantly.

(2 min) Recent years have seen a significant amount of interests in Sequential Recommendation (SR), which aims to understand and model the sequential user behaviors and the interactions between users and items over time. Surprisingly, despite the huge success Sequential Recommendation has achieved, there is little study on Sequential Search (SS), a twin learning task that takes into account a user's current and past search queries, in addition to behavior on historical query sessions. The SS learning task is even more important than the counterpart SR task for most of E-commence companies due to its much larger online serving demands as well as traffic volume. To this end, we propose a highly scalable hybrid learning model that consists of an RNN learning framework leveraging all features in short-term user-item interactions, and an attention model utilizing selected item-only features from long-term interactions. As a novel optimization step, we fit multiple short user sequences in a single RNN pass within a training batch, by solving a greedy knapsack problem on the fly. Moreover, we explore the use of off-policy reinforcement learning in multi-session personalized search ranking. Specifically, we design a pairwise Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient model that efficiently captures users' long term reward in terms of pairwise classification error. Extensive ablation experiments demonstrate significant improvement each component brings to its state-of-the-art baseline, on a variety of offline and online metrics.

(2 min) Tensor completion aims at imputing missing entries from a partially observed tensor. Existing tensor completion methods often assume either multi-linear or nonlinear relationships between latent components. However, real-world tensors have much more complex patterns where both multi-linear and nonlinear relationships may coexist. In such cases, the existing methods are insufficient to describe the data structure. This paper proposes a Joint mUlti-linear and nonLinear IdentificAtion (JULIA) framework for large-scale tensor completion. JULIA unifies the multi-linear and nonlinear tensor completion models with several advantages over the existing methods: 1) Flexible model selection, i.e., it fits a tensor by assigning its values as a combination of multi-linear and nonlinear components; 2) Compatible with existing nonlinear tensor completion methods; 3) Efficient training based on a well-designed alternating optimization approach. Experiments on six real large-scale tensors demonstrate that JULIA outperforms many existing tensor completion algorithms. Furthermore, JULIA can improve the performance of a class of nonlinear tensor completion methods. The results show that in some large-scale tensor completion scenarios, baseline methods with JULIA are able to obtain up to 55% lower root mean-squared-error and save 67% computational complexity.

(2 min) A key assumption of most statistical machine learning methods is that they have access to independent samples from the distribution of data they encounter at test time. As such, these methods often perform poorly in the face of biased data, which breaks this assumption. In particular, machine learning models have been shown to exhibit Clever-Hans-like behaviour, meaning that spurious correlations in the training set are inadvertently learnt. A number of works have been proposed to revise deep classifiers to learn the right correlations. However, generative models have been overlooked so far. We observe that generative models are also prone to Clever-Hans-like behaviour. To counteract this issue, we propose to debias generative models by disentangling their internal representations, which is achieved via human feedback. Our experiments show that this is effective at removing bias even when human feedback covers only a small fraction of the desired distribution. In addition, we achieve strong disentanglement results in a quantitative comparison with recent methods.

(0 min) Federated learning (FL) has been intensively investigated in terms of communication efficiency, privacy, and fairness. However, efficient annotation, which is a pain point in real-world FL applications, is less studied. In this project, we propose to apply active learning (AL) and sampling strategy into the FL framework to reduce the annotation workload. We expect that the AL and FL can improve the performance of each other complementarily. In our proposed federated active learning (F-AL) method, the clients collaboratively implement the AL to obtain the instances which are considered as informative to FL in a distributed optimization manner. We compare the test accuracies of the global FL models using the conventional random sampling strategy, client-level separate AL (S-AL), and the proposed F-AL. We empirically demonstrate that the F-AL outperforms baseline methods in image classification tasks.

(2 min) The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996-2020. We construct the partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of this group: the returnees. Our analyses shed light on the career stages and gender disparities between researchers who remain in Germany, those who emigrate, and those who eventually return. We find that the return migration streams are even more gender imbalanced, which points to the need for additional efforts to encourage female researchers to come back to Germany. We document a slightly declining trend in return migration among more recent cohorts of researchers who left Germany, which, for most disciplines, was associated with a decrease in the German collaborative ties of these researchers. Moreover, we find that the gender disparities for the most gender imbalanced disciplines are unlikely to be mitigated by return migration given the gender compositions of the cohorts of researchers who have left Germany and of those who have returned. This analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the development of science policy.

(2 min) Many-to-one maps are ubiquitous in machine learning, from the image recognition model that assigns a multitude of distinct images to the concept of "cat" to the time series forecasting model which assigns a range of distinct time-series to a single scalar regression value. While the primary use of such models is naturally to associate correct output to each input, in many problems it is also useful to be able to explore, understand, and sample from a model's fibers, which are the set of input values $x$ such that $f(x) = y$, for fixed $y$ in the output space. In this paper we show that popular generative architectures are ill-suited to such tasks. Motivated by this we introduce a novel generative architecture, a Bundle Network, based on the concept of a fiber bundle from (differential) topology. BundleNets exploit the idea of a local trivialization wherein a space can be locally decomposed into a product space that cleanly encodes the many-to-one nature of the map. By enforcing this decomposition in BundleNets and by utilizing state-of-the-art invertible components, investigating a network's fibers becomes natural.

(2 min) Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal comprises physiological information related to cardiorespiratory health. However, while recording, these PPG signals are easily corrupted by motion artifacts and body movements, leading to noise enriched, poor quality signals. Therefore ensuring high-quality signals is necessary to extract cardiorespiratory information accurately. Although there exists several rule-based and Machine-Learning (ML) - based approaches for PPG signal quality estimation, those algorithms' efficacy is questionable. Thus, this work proposes a lightweight CNN architecture for signal quality assessment employing a novel Quantum pattern recognition (QPR) technique. The proposed algorithm is validated on manually annotated data obtained from the University of Queensland database. A total of 28366, 5s signal segments are preprocessed and transformed into image files of 20 x 500 pixels. The image files are treated as an input to the 2D CNN architecture. The developed model classifies the PPG signal as `good' or `bad' with an accuracy of 98.3% with 99.3% sensitivity, 94.5% specificity and 98.9% F1-score. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework is validated against the noisy `Welltory app' collected PPG database. Even in a noisy environment, the proposed architecture proved its competence. Experimental analysis concludes that a slim architecture along with a novel Spatio-temporal pattern recognition technique improve the system's performance. Hence, the proposed approach can be useful to classify good and bad PPG signals for a resource-constrained wearable implementation.

(2 min) Representing words by vectors, or embeddings, enables computational reasoning and is foundational to automating natural language tasks. For example, if word embeddings of similar words contain similar values, word similarity can be readily assessed, whereas judging that from their spelling is often impossible (e.g. cat /feline) and to predetermine and store similarities between all words is prohibitively time-consuming, memory intensive and subjective. We focus on word embeddings learned from text corpora and knowledge graphs. Several well-known algorithms learn word embeddings from text on an unsupervised basis by learning to predict those words that occur around each word, e.g. word2vec and GloVe. Parameters of such word embeddings are known to reflect word co-occurrence statistics, but how they capture semantic meaning has been unclear. Knowledge graph representation models learn representations both of entities (words, people, places, etc.) and relations between them, typically by training a model to predict known facts in a supervised manner. Despite steady improvements in fact prediction accuracy, little is understood of the latent structure that enables this. The limited understanding of how latent semantic structure is encoded in the geometry of word embeddings and knowledge graph representations makes a principled means of improving their performance, reliability or interpretability unclear. To address this: 1. we theoretically justify the empirical observation that particular geometric relationships between word embeddings learned by algorithms such as word2vec and GloVe correspond to semantic relations between words; and 2. we extend this correspondence between semantics and geometry to the entities and relations of knowledge graphs, providing a model for the latent structure of knowledge graph representation linked to that of word embeddings.

(2 min) We explore an online reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm to dynamically optimize parallel particle tracing performance in distributed-memory systems. Our method combines three novel components: (1) a work donation algorithm, (2) a high-order workload estimation model, and (3) a communication cost model. First, we design an RL-based work donation algorithm. Our algorithm monitors workloads of processes and creates RL agents to donate data blocks and particles from high-workload processes to low-workload processes to minimize program execution time. The agents learn the donation strategy on the fly based on reward and cost functions designed to consider processes' workload changes and data transfer costs of donation actions. Second, we propose a workload estimation model, helping RL agents estimate the workload distribution of processes in future computations. Third, we design a communication cost model that considers both block and particle data exchange costs, helping RL agents make effective decisions with minimized communication costs. We demonstrate that our algorithm adapts to different flow behaviors in large-scale fluid dynamics, ocean, and weather simulation data. Our algorithm improves parallel particle tracing performance in terms of parallel efficiency, load balance, and costs of I/O and communication for evaluations with up to 16,384 processors.

(2 min) A key challenge facing deep learning is that neural networks are often not robust to shifts in the underlying data distribution. We study this problem from the perspective of the statistical concept of parameter identification. Generalization bounds from learning theory often assume that the test distribution is close to the training distribution. In contrast, if we can identify the "true" parameters, then the model generalizes to arbitrary distribution shifts. However, neural networks typically have internal symmetries that make parameter identification impossible. We show that we can identify the function represented by a quadratic network even though we cannot identify its parameters; we extend this result to neural networks with ReLU activations. Thus, we can obtain robust generalization bounds for neural networks. We leverage this result to obtain new bounds for contextual bandits and transfer learning with quadratic neural networks. Overall, our results suggest that we can improve robustness of neural networks by designing models that can represent the true data generating process.

(2 min) This paper studies quasi-Newton methods for solving strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle point problems (SPP). We propose greedy and random Broyden family updates for SPP, which have explicit local superlinear convergence rate of ${\mathcal O}\big(\big(1-\frac{1}{n\kappa^2}\big)^{k(k-1)/2}\big)$, where $n$ is dimensions of the problem, $\kappa$ is the condition number and $k$ is the number of iterations. The design and analysis of proposed algorithm are based on estimating the square of indefinite Hessian matrix, which is different from classical quasi-Newton methods in convex optimization. We also present two specific Broyden family algorithms with BFGS-type and SR1-type updates, which enjoy the faster local convergence rate of $\mathcal O\big(\big(1-\frac{1}{n}\big)^{k(k-1)/2}\big)$. Additionally, we extend our algorithms to solve general nonlinear equations and prove it enjoys the similar convergence rate.

(2 min) The Lipschitz constant of neural networks has been established as a key quantity to enforce the robustness to adversarial examples. In this paper, we tackle the problem of building $1$-Lipschitz Neural Networks. By studying Residual Networks from a continuous time dynamical system perspective, we provide a generic method to build $1$-Lipschitz Neural Networks and show that some previous approaches are special cases of this framework. Then, we extend this reasoning and show that ResNet flows derived from convex potentials define $1$-Lipschitz transformations, that lead us to define the {\em Convex Potential Layer} (CPL). A comprehensive set of experiments on several datasets demonstrates the scalability of our architecture and the benefits as an $\ell_2$-provable defense against adversarial examples.

(2 min) Complex-valued processing has brought deep learning-based speech enhancement and signal extraction to a new level. Typically, the process is based on a time-frequency (TF) mask which is applied to a noisy spectrogram, while complex masks (CM) are usually preferred over real-valued masks due to their ability to modify the phase. Recent work proposed to use a complex filter instead of a point-wise multiplication with a mask. This allows to incorporate information from previous and future time steps exploiting local correlations within each frequency band. In this work, we propose DeepFilterNet, a two stage speech enhancement framework utilizing deep filtering. First, we enhance the spectral envelope using ERB-scaled gains modeling the human frequency perception. The second stage employs deep filtering to enhance the periodic components of speech. Additionally to taking advantage of perceptual properties of speech, we enforce network sparsity via separable convolutions and extensive grouping in linear and recurrent layers to design a low complexity architecture. We further show that our two stage deep filtering approach outperforms complex masks over a variety of frequency resolutions and latencies and demonstrate convincing performance compared to other state-of-the-art models.

(2 min) Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory is widely used to study the dynamics of infinitely-wide deep neural networks (DNNs) under gradient descent. But do the results for infinitely-wide networks give us hints about the behavior of real finite-width ones? In this paper, we study empirically when NTK theory is valid in practice for fully-connected ReLU and sigmoid DNNs. We find out that whether a network is in the NTK regime depends on the hyperparameters of random initialization and the network's depth. In particular, NTK theory does not explain the behavior of sufficiently deep networks initialized so that their gradients explode as they propagate through the network's layers: the kernel is random at initialization and changes significantly during training in this case, contrary to NTK theory. On the other hand, in the case of vanishing gradients, DNNs are in the the NTK regime but become untrainable rapidly with depth. We also describe a framework to study generalization properties of DNNs, in particular the variance of network's output function, by means of NTK theory and discuss its limits.

(2 min) Graph neural networks (GNN) have been ubiquitous in graph node classification tasks. Most of GNN methods update the node embedding iteratively by aggregating its neighbors' information. However, they often suffer from negative disturbance, due to edges connecting nodes with different labels. One approach to alleviate this negative disturbance is to use attention to learn the weights of aggregation, but current attention-based GNNs only consider feature similarity and also suffer from the lack of supervision. In this paper, we consider the label dependency of graph nodes and propose a decoupling attention mechanism to learn both hard and soft attention. The hard attention is learned on labels for a refined graph structure with fewer inter-class edges, so that the aggregation's negative disturbance can be reduced. The soft attention aims to learn the aggregation weights based on features over the refined graph structure to enhance information gains during message passing. Particularly, we formulate our model under the EM framework, and the learned attention is used to guide the label propagation in the M-step and the feature propagation in the E-step, respectively. Extensive experiments are performed on six well-known benchmark graph datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

(2 min) Patient-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) that contains a complex biological cargo is a valuable source of liquid biopsy diagnostics to aid in early detection, cancer screening, and precision nanotherapeutics. In this study, we predicted that coupling cancer patient blood-derived EVs to time-resolved spectroscopy and artificial intelligence (AI) could provide a robust cancer screening and follow-up tools. Methods: Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) measurements were performed on 24 blood samples-derived EVs. Blood samples were obtained from 15 cancer patients (presenting 5 different types of cancers), and 9 healthy controls (including patients with benign lesions). The obtained FCS autocorrelation spectra were processed into power spectra using the Fast-Fourier Transform algorithm and subjected to various machine learning algorithms to distinguish cancer spectra from healthy control spectra. Results and Applications: The performance of AdaBoost Random Forest (RF) classifier, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron, were tested on selected frequencies in the N=118 power spectra. The RF classifier exhibited a 90% classification accuracy and high sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing the FCS power spectra of cancer patients from those of healthy controls. Further, an image convolutional neural network (CNN), ResNet network, and a quantum CNN were assessed on the power spectral images as additional validation tools. All image-based CNNs exhibited a nearly equal classification performance with an accuracy of roughly 82% and reasonably high sensitivity and specificity scores. Our pilot study demonstrates that AI-algorithms coupled to time-resolved FCS power spectra can accurately and differentially classify the complex patient-derived EVs from different cancer samples of distinct tissue subtypes.

(2 min) The goal of community detection over graphs is to recover underlying labels/attributes of users (e.g., political affiliation) given the connectivity between users (represented by adjacency matrix of a graph). There has been significant recent progress on understanding the fundamental limits of community detection when the graph is generated from a stochastic block model (SBM). Specifically, sharp information theoretic limits and efficient algorithms have been obtained for SBMs as a function of $p$ and $q$, which represent the intra-community and inter-community connection probabilities. In this paper, we study the community detection problem while preserving the privacy of the individual connections (edges) between the vertices. Focusing on the notion of $(\epsilon, \delta)$-edge differential privacy (DP), we seek to understand the fundamental tradeoffs between $(p, q)$, DP budget $(\epsilon, \delta)$, and computational efficiency for exact recovery of the community labels. To this end, we present and analyze the associated information-theoretic tradeoffs for three broad classes of differentially private community recovery mechanisms: a) stability based mechanism; b) sampling based mechanisms; and c) graph perturbation mechanisms. Our main findings are that stability and sampling based mechanisms lead to a superior tradeoff between $(p,q)$ and the privacy budget $(\epsilon, \delta)$; however this comes at the expense of higher computational complexity. On the other hand, albeit low complexity, graph perturbation mechanisms require the privacy budget $\epsilon$ to scale as $\Omega(\log(n))$ for exact recovery. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the impact of privacy constraints on the fundamental limits for community detection.

(2 min) Using deep learning models to classify time series data generated from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices requires a large amount of labeled data. However, due to constrained resources available in IoT devices, it is often difficult to accommodate training using large data sets. This paper proposes and demonstrates a Similarity Learning-based Few Shot Learning for ECG arrhythmia classification using Siamese Convolutional Neural Networks. Few shot learning resolves the data scarcity issue by identifying novel classes from very few labeled examples. Few Shot Learning relies first on pretraining the model on a related relatively large database, and then the learning is used for further adaptation towards few examples available per class. Our experiments evaluate the performance accuracy with respect to K (number of instances per class) for ECG time series data classification. The accuracy with 5- shot learning is 92.25% which marginally improves with further increase in K. We also compare the performance of our method against other well-established similarity learning techniques such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), Euclidean Distance (ED), and a deep learning model - Long Short Term Memory Fully Convolutional Network (LSTM-FCN) with the same amount of data and conclude that our method outperforms them for a limited dataset size. For K=5, the accuracies obtained are 57%, 54%, 33%, and 92% approximately for ED, DTW, LSTM-FCN, and SCNN, respectively.

(2 min) Constrained clustering has gained significant attention in the field of machine learning as it can leverage prior information on a growing amount of only partially labeled data. Following recent advances in deep generative models, we propose a novel framework for constrained clustering that is intuitive, interpretable, and can be trained efficiently in the framework of stochastic gradient variational inference. By explicitly integrating domain knowledge in the form of probabilistic relations, our proposed model (DC-GMM) uncovers the underlying distribution of data conditioned on prior clustering preferences, expressed as pairwise constraints. These constraints guide the clustering process towards a desirable partition of the data by indicating which samples should or should not belong to the same cluster. We provide extensive experiments to demonstrate that DC-GMM shows superior clustering performances and robustness compared to state-of-the-art deep constrained clustering methods on a wide range of data sets. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on two challenging real-world applications.

(2 min) Focus of this work is to recognize standards and further features directly from 3D CAD models. For this reason, a neural network was trained to recognize nine classes of machine elements. After the system identified a part as a standard, like a hexagon head screw after the DIN EN ISO 8676, it accesses the geometrical information of the CAD system via the Application Programming Interface (API). In the API, the system searches for necessary information to describe the part appropriately. Based on this information standardized parts can be recognized in detail and supplemented with further information.

(2 min) Preserving the privacy and security of big data in the context of cloud computing, while maintaining a certain level of efficiency of its processing remains to be a subject, open for improvement. One of the most popular applications epitomizing said concerns is found to be useful in genome analysis. This work proposes a secure multi-label tumor classification method using homomorphic encryption, whereby two different machine learning algorithms, SVM and XGBoost, are used to classify the encrypted genome data of different tumor types.

(2 min) This paper considers the distributed online convex optimization problem with time-varying constraints over a network of agents. This is a sequential decision making problem with two sequences of arbitrarily varying convex loss and constraint functions. At each round, each agent selects a decision from the decision set, and then only a portion of the loss function and a coordinate block of the constraint function at this round are privately revealed to this agent. The goal of the network is to minimize the network-wide loss accumulated over time. Two distributed online algorithms with full-information and bandit feedback are proposed. Both dynamic and static network regret bounds are analyzed for the proposed algorithms, and network cumulative constraint violation is used to measure constraint violation, which excludes the situation that strictly feasible constraints can compensate the effects of violated constraints. In particular, we show that the proposed algorithms achieve $\mathcal{O}(T^{\max\{\kappa,1-\kappa\}})$ static network regret and $\mathcal{O}(T^{1-\kappa/2})$ network cumulative constraint violation, where $T$ is the time horizon and $\kappa\in(0,1)$ is a user-defined trade-off parameter. Moreover, if the loss functions are strongly convex, then the static network regret bound can be reduced to $\mathcal{O}(T^{\kappa})$. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

(2 min) Traffic flow forecasting is a crucial task in urban computing. The challenge arises as traffic flows often exhibit intrinsic and latent spatio-temporal correlations that cannot be identified by extracting the spatial and temporal patterns of traffic data separately. We argue that such correlations are universal and play a pivotal role in traffic flow. We put forward {spacetime interval learning} as a paradigm to explicitly capture these correlations through a unified analysis of both spatial and temporal features. Unlike the state-of-the-art methods, which are restricted to a particular road network, we model the universal spatio-temporal correlations that are transferable from cities to cities. To this end, we propose a new spacetime interval learning framework that constructs a local-spacetime context of a traffic sensor comprising the data from its neighbors within close time points. Based on this idea, we introduce local spacetime neural network (STNN), which employs novel spacetime convolution and attention mechanism to learn the universal spatio-temporal correlations. The proposed STNN captures local traffic patterns, which does not depend on a specific network structure. As a result, a trained STNN model can be applied on any unseen traffic networks. We evaluate the proposed STNN on two public real-world traffic datasets and a simulated dataset on dynamic networks. The experiment results show that STNN not only improves prediction accuracy by 4% over state-of-the-art methods, but is also effective in handling the case when the traffic network undergoes dynamic changes as well as the superior generalization capability.

(2 min) Low-rank approximation of images via singular value decomposition is well-received in the era of big data. However, singular value decomposition (SVD) is only for order-two data, i.e., matrices. It is necessary to flatten a higher order input into a matrix or break it into a series of order-two slices to tackle higher order data such as multispectral images and videos with the SVD. Higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) extends the SVD and can approximate higher order data using sums of a few rank-one components. We consider the problem of generalizing HOSVD over a finite dimensional commutative algebra. This algebra, referred to as a t-algebra, generalizes the field of complex numbers. The elements of the algebra, called t-scalars, are fix-sized arrays of complex numbers. One can generalize matrices and tensors over t-scalars and then extend many canonical matrix and tensor algorithms, including HOSVD, to obtain higher-performance versions. The generalization of HOSVD is called THOSVD. Its performance of approximating multi-way data can be further improved by an alternating algorithm. THOSVD also unifies a wide range of principal component analysis algorithms. To exploit the potential of generalized algorithms using t-scalars for approximating images, we use a pixel neighborhood strategy to convert each pixel to "deeper-order" t-scalar. Experiments on publicly available images show that the generalized algorithm over t-scalars, namely THOSVD, compares favorably with its canonical counterparts.

(2 min) Differentiable physics modeling combines physics models with gradient-based learning to provide model explicability and data efficiency. It has been used to learn dynamics, solve inverse problems and facilitate design, and is at its inception of impact. Current successes have concentrated on general physics models such as rigid bodies, deformable sheets, etc., assuming relatively simple structures and forces. Their granularity is intrinsically coarse and therefore incapable of modelling complex physical phenomena. Fine-grained models are still to be developed to incorporate sophisticated material structures and force interactions with gradient-based learning. Following this motivation, we propose a new differentiable fabrics model for composite materials such as cloths, where we dive into the granularity of yarns and model individual yarn physics and yarn-to-yarn interactions. To this end, we propose several differentiable forces, whose counterparts in empirical physics are indifferentiable, to facilitate gradient-based learning. These forces, albeit applied to cloths, are ubiquitous in various physical systems. Through comprehensive evaluation and comparison, we demonstrate our model's explicability in learning meaningful physical parameters, versatility in incorporating complex physical structures and heterogeneous materials, data-efficiency in learning, and high-fidelity in capturing subtle dynamics.

(2 min) We study the smooth minimax optimization problem $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is $\ell$-smooth, strongly-concave in ${\bf y}$ but possibly nonconvex in ${\bf x}$. Most of existing works focus on finding the first-order stationary point of the function $f({\bf x},{\bf y})$ or its primal function $P({\bf x})\triangleq \max_{\bf y} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, but few of them focus on achieving the second-order stationary point. %, which is essential to nonconvex problems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for minimax optimization, called Minimax Cubic Newton (MCN), which could find an ${\mathcal O}\left(\varepsilon,\kappa^{1.5}\sqrt{\rho\varepsilon}\right)$-second-order stationary point of $P({\bf x})$ with calling ${\mathcal O}\left(\kappa^{1.5}\sqrt{\rho}\varepsilon^{-1.5}\right)$ times of second-order oracles and $\tilde{\mathcal O}\left(\kappa^{2}\sqrt{\rho}\varepsilon^{-1.5}\right)$ times of first-order oracles, where $\kappa$ is the condition number and $\rho$ is the Lipschitz continuous constant for the Hessian of $f({\bf x},{\bf y})$. In addition, we propose an inexact variant of MCN for high-dimensional problems to avoid calling the expensive second-order oracles. Instead, our method solves the cubic sub-problem inexactly via gradient descent and matrix Chebyshev expansion. This strategy still obtains the desired approximate second-order stationary point with high probability but only requires $\tilde{\mathcal O}\left(\kappa^{1.5}\ell\varepsilon^{-2}\right)$ Hessian-vector oracle calls and $\tilde{\mathcal O}\left(\kappa^{2}\sqrt{\rho}\varepsilon^{-1.5}\right)$ first-order oracle calls. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers the non-asymptotic convergence behavior of finding second-order stationary points for minimax problems without the convex-concave assumptions.

(2 min) This paper studies decentralized convex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_x\max_y f(x,y) \triangleq\frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m f_i(x,y)$, where $m$ is the number of agents and each local function can be written as $f_i(x,y)=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{j=1}^n f_{i,j}(x,y)$. We propose a novel decentralized optimization algorithm, called multi-consensus stochastic variance reduced extragradient, which achieves the best known stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) complexity for this problem. Specifically, each agent requires $\mathcal O((n+\kappa\sqrt{n})\log(1/\varepsilon))$ SFO calls for strongly-convex-strongly-concave problem and $\mathcal O((n+\sqrt{n}L/\varepsilon)\log(1/\varepsilon))$ SFO call for general convex-concave problem to achieve $\varepsilon$-accurate solution in expectation, where $\kappa$ is the condition number and $L$ is the smoothness parameter. The numerical experiments show the proposed method performs better than baselines.

(2 min) This paper proposes an efficient supervised contrastive learning framework, called Self-Contrastive (SelfCon) learning, that self-contrasts within multiple outputs from the different levels of a multi-exit network. SelfCon learning with a single-view does not require additional augmented samples, which resolves the concerns of multi-viewed batch (e.g., high computational cost and generalization error). Unlike the previous works based on the mutual information (MI) between the multi-views in unsupervised learning, we prove the MI bound for SelfCon loss in a supervised and single-viewed framework. We also empirically analyze that the success of SelfCon learning is related to the regularization effect from the single-view and sub-network. For ImageNet, SelfCon with a single-viewed batch improves accuracy by +0.3\% with 67\% memory and 45\% time of Supervised Contrastive (SupCon) learning, and a simple ensemble of multi-exit outputs boost performance up to +1.4\%.

(2 min) Any reasonable machine learning (ML) model should not only interpolate efficiently in between the training samples provided (in-distribution region), but also approach the extrapolative or out-of-distribution (OOD) region without being overconfident. Our experiment on human subjects justifies the aforementioned properties for human intelligence as well. Many state-of-the-art algorithms have tried to fix the overconfidence problem of ML models in the OOD region. However, in doing so, they have often impaired the in-distribution performance of the model. Our key insight is that ML models partition the feature space into polytopes and learn constant (random forests) or affine (ReLU networks) functions over those polytopes. This leads to the OOD overconfidence problem for the polytopes which lie in the training data boundary and extend to infinity. To resolve this issue, we propose kernel density methods that fit Gaussian kernel over the polytopes, which are learned using ML models. Specifically, we introduce two variants of kernel density polytopes: Kernel Density Forest (KDF) and Kernel Density Network (KDN) based on random forests and deep networks, respectively. Studies on various simulation settings show that both KDF and KDN achieve uniform confidence over the classes in the OOD region while maintaining good in-distribution accuracy compared to that of their respective parent models.

(2 min) Message passing is a fundamental procedure for graph neural networks in the field of graph representation learning. Based on the homophily assumption, the current message passing always aggregates features of connected nodes, such as the graph Laplacian smoothing process. However, real-world graphs tend to be noisy and/or non-smooth. The homophily assumption does not always hold, leading to sub-optimal results. A revised message passing method needs to maintain each node's discriminative ability when aggregating the message from neighbors. To this end, we propose a Memory-based Message Passing (MMP) method to decouple the message of each node into a self-embedding part for discrimination and a memory part for propagation. Furthermore, we develop a control mechanism and a decoupling regularization to control the ratio of absorbing and excluding the message in the memory for each node. More importantly, our MMP is a general skill that can work as an additional layer to help improve traditional GNNs performance. Extensive experiments on various datasets with different homophily ratios demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

(2 min) Adversarial robustness has become a topic of growing interest in machine learning since it was observed that neural networks tend to be brittle. We propose an information-geometric formulation of adversarial defense and introduce FIRE, a new Fisher-Rao regularization for the categorical cross-entropy loss, which is based on the geodesic distance between the softmax outputs corresponding to natural and perturbed input features. Based on the information-geometric properties of the class of softmax distributions, we derive an explicit characterization of the Fisher-Rao Distance (FRD) for the binary and multiclass cases, and draw some interesting properties as well as connections with standard regularization metrics. Furthermore, for a simple linear and Gaussian model, we show that all Pareto-optimal points in the accuracy-robustness region can be reached by FIRE while other state-of-the-art methods fail. Empirically, we evaluate the performance of various classifiers trained with the proposed loss on standard datasets, showing up to a simultaneous 1\% of improvement in terms of clean and robust performances while reducing the training time by 20\% over the best-performing methods.

(2 min) Current methods in continual learning (CL) tend to focus on alleviating catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks. This hinders balancing other CL desiderata such as forward transfer, and memory and computation efficiency. CL desiderata become much more competing when a model operates on class-Incremental Learning (class-IL) without accessing past data since it is prone to ambiguities between old and new classes. In this paper, we present Knowledge-Aware coNtinual learner (KAN) that attempts to study the stability-plasticity dilemma to balance CL desiderata in class-IL. In particular, KAN is a new task-specific components method based on dynamic sparse training that introduces reusability and selective transfer of past knowledge in this class of methods. KAN selectively reuses relevant knowledge while addressing class ambiguity, preserves old knowledge, and utilizes the model capacity efficiently. Experiments show the effectiveness of KAN in providing models with multiple CL desirable properties, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on various challenging benchmarks.

(2 min) The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations require accurate modeling of the anisotropic Reynolds stress tensor. Traditional closure models, while sophisticated, often only apply to restricted flow configurations. Researchers have started using machine learning approaches to tackle this problem by developing more general closure models informed by data. In this work we build upon recent convolutional neural network architectures used for turbulence modeling and propose a multi-task learning-based fully convolutional neural network that is able to accurately predict the normalized anisotropic Reynolds stress tensor for turbulent duct flows. Furthermore, we also explore the application of curriculum learning to data-driven turbulence modeling.

(2 min) Multi-domain text classification (MDTC) has obtained remarkable achievements due to the advent of deep learning. Recently, many endeavors are devoted to applying adversarial learning to extract domain-invariant features to yield state-of-the-art results. However, these methods still face one challenge: transforming original features to be domain-invariant distorts the distributions of the original features, degrading the discriminability of the learned features. To address this issue, we first investigate the structure of the batch classification output matrix and theoretically justify that the discriminability of the learned features has a positive correlation with the Frobenius norm of the batch output matrix. Based on this finding, we propose a maximum batch Frobenius norm (MBF) method to boost the feature discriminability for MDTC. Experiments on two MDTC benchmarks show that our MBF approach can effectively advance the performance of the state-of-the-art.

(0 min) For training neural networks, flat-minima optimizers that seek to find parameters in neighborhoods having uniformly low loss (flat minima) have been shown to improve upon stochastic and adaptive gradient-based methods. Two methods for finding flat minima stand out: 1. Averaging methods (i.e., Stochastic Weight Averaging, SWA), and 2. Minimax methods (i.e., Sharpness Aware Minimization, SAM). However, despite similar motivations, there has been limited investigation into their properties and no comprehensive comparison between them. In this work, we investigate the loss surfaces from a systematic benchmarking of these approaches across computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning tasks. This leads us to a hypothesis: since both approaches find flat solutions in orthogonal ways, combining them should improve generalization even further. We verify this improves over either flat-minima approach in 39 out of 42 cases. When it does not, we provide potential explanations. We hope our results across image, graph, and text data will help researchers to improve deep learning optimizers, and practitioners to pinpoint the optimizer for the problem at hand.

(0 min) Stacking Gaussian Processes severely diminishes the model's ability to detect outliers, which when combined with non-zero mean functions, further extrapolates low non-parametric variance to low training data density regions. We propose a hybrid kernel inspired from Varifold theory, operating in both Euclidean and Wasserstein space. We posit that directly taking into account the variance in the computation of Wasserstein-2 distances is of key importance towards maintaining outlier status throughout the hierarchy. We show improved performance on medium and large scale datasets and enhanced out-of-distribution detection on both toy and real data.

(0 min) A Java parallel streams implementation of the $K$-nearest neighbor descent algorithm is presented using a natural statistical termination criterion. Input data consist of a set $S$ of $n$ objects of type V, and a Function>, which enables any $x \in S$ to decide which of $y, z \in S\setminus\{x\}$ is more similar to $x$. Experiments with the Kullback-Leibler divergence Comparator support the prediction that the number of rounds of $K$-nearest neighbor updates need not exceed twice the diameter of the undirected version of a random regular out-degree $K$ digraph on $n$ vertices. Overall complexity was $O(n K^2 \log_K(n))$ in the class of examples studied. When objects are sampled uniformly from a $d$-dimensional simplex, accuracy of the $K$-nearest neighbor approximation is high up to $d = 20$, but declines in higher dimensions, as theory would predict.

(0 min) Representing words by vectors, or embeddings, enables computational reasoning and is foundational to automating natural language tasks. For example, if word embeddings of similar words contain similar values, word similarity can be readily assessed, whereas judging that from their spelling is often impossible (e.g. cat /feline) and to predetermine and store similarities between all words is prohibitively time-consuming, memory intensive and subjective. We focus on word embeddings learned from text corpora and knowledge graphs. Several well-known algorithms learn word embeddings from text on an unsupervised basis by learning to predict those words that occur around each word, e.g. word2vec and GloVe. Parameters of such word embeddings are known to reflect word co-occurrence statistics, but how they capture semantic meaning has been unclear. Knowledge graph representation models learn representations both of entities (words, people, places, etc.) and relations between them, typically by training a model to predict known facts in a supervised manner. Despite steady improvements in fact prediction accuracy, little is understood of the latent structure that enables this. The limited understanding of how latent semantic structure is encoded in the geometry of word embeddings and knowledge graph representations makes a principled means of improving their performance, reliability or interpretability unclear. To address this: 1. we theoretically justify the empirical observation that particular geometric relationships between word embeddings learned by algorithms such as word2vec and GloVe correspond to semantic relations between words; and 2. we extend this correspondence between semantics and geometry to the entities and relations of knowledge graphs, providing a model for the latent structure of knowledge graph representation linked to that of word embeddings.

(0 min) Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a popular approach for various applications, ranging from social network analysis to modeling chemical properties of molecules. While GNNs often show remarkable performance on public datasets, they can struggle to learn long-range dependencies in the data due to over-smoothing and over-squashing tendencies. To alleviate this challenge, we propose PCAPass, a method which combines Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and message passing for generating node embeddings in an unsupervised manner and leverages gradient boosted decision trees for classification tasks. We show empirically that this approach provides competitive performance compared to popular GNNs on node classification benchmarks, while gathering information from longer distance neighborhoods. Our research demonstrates that applying dimensionality reduction with message passing and skip connections is a promising mechanism for aggregating long-range dependencies in graph structured data.

(0 min) Secure model aggregation is a key component of federated learning (FL) that aims at protecting the privacy of each user's individual model while allowing for their global aggregation. It can be applied to any aggregation-based FL approach for training a global or personalized model. Model aggregation needs to also be resilient against likely user dropouts in FL systems, making its design substantially more complex. State-of-the-art secure aggregation protocols rely on secret sharing of the random-seeds used for mask generations at the users to enable the reconstruction and cancellation of those belonging to the dropped users. The complexity of such approaches, however, grows substantially with the number of dropped users. We propose a new approach, named LightSecAgg, to overcome this bottleneck by changing the design from "random-seed reconstruction of the dropped users" to "one-shot aggregate-mask reconstruction of the active users via mask encoding/decoding". We show that LightSecAgg achieves the same privacy and dropout-resiliency guarantees as the state-of-the-art protocols while significantly reducing the overhead for resiliency against dropped users. We also demonstrate that, unlike existing schemes, LightSecAgg can be applied to secure aggregation in the asynchronous FL setting. Furthermore, we provide a modular system design and optimized on-device parallelization for scalable implementation, by enabling computational overlapping between model training and on-device encoding, as well as improving the speed of concurrent receiving and sending of chunked masks. We evaluate LightSecAgg via extensive experiments for training diverse models on various datasets in a realistic FL system with large number of users and demonstrate that LightSecAgg significantly reduces the total training time.

(0 min) In logistic regression, it is often desirable to utilize regularization to promote sparse solutions, particularly for problems with a large number of features compared to available labels. In this paper, we present screening rules that safely remove features from logistic regression with $\ell_0-\ell_2$ regularization before solving the problem. The proposed safe screening rules are based on lower bounds from the Fenchel dual of strong conic relaxations of the logistic regression problem. Numerical experiments with real and synthetic data suggest that a high percentage of the features can be effectively and safely removed apriori, leading to substantial speed-up in the computations.

(0 min) Mixtures of experts have become an indispensable tool for flexible modelling in a supervised learning context, and sparse Gaussian processes (GP) have shown promise as a leading candidate for the experts in such models. In this article, we propose to design the gating network for selecting the experts from such mixtures of sparse GPs using a deep neural network (DNN). Furthermore, an ultra-fast one pass algorithm called Cluster-Classify-Regress (CCR) is leveraged to approximate the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator extremely quickly. This powerful combination of model and algorithm together delivers a novel method which is flexible, robust, and extremely efficient. In particular, the method is able to outperform competing methods in terms of accuracy and uncertainty quantification. The cost is competitive on low-dimensional and small data sets but is significantly lower for higher dimensional and big data sets. Iteratively maximizing the distribution of experts given allocations and allocations given experts does not provide significant improvement, which indicates that the algorithm achieves a good approximation to the local MAP estimator very fast. This insight can be useful also in the context of other mixture of experts models.

(0 min) Policy gradient (PG) estimation becomes a challenge when we are not allowed to sample with the target policy but only have access to a dataset generated by some unknown behavior policy. Conventional methods for off-policy PG estimation often suffer from either significant bias or exponentially large variance. In this paper, we propose the double Fitted PG estimation (FPG) algorithm. FPG can work with an arbitrary policy parameterization, assuming access to a Bellman-complete value function class. In the case of linear value function approximation, we provide a tight finite-sample upper bound on policy gradient estimation error, that is governed by the amount of distribution mismatch measured in feature space. We also establish the asymptotic normality of FPG estimation error with a precise covariance characterization, which is further shown to be statistically optimal with a matching Cramer-Rao lower bound. Empirically, we evaluate the performance of FPG on both policy gradient estimation and policy optimization, using either softmax tabular or ReLU policy networks. Under various metrics, our results show that FPG significantly outperforms existing off-policy PG estimation methods based on importance sampling and variance reduction techniques.

(0 min) We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from high-dimensional, observational data with unobserved confounders. Unobserved confounders introduce ignorance -- a level of unidentifiability -- about an individual's response to treatment by inducing bias in CATE estimates. We present a new parametric interval estimator suited for high-dimensional data, that estimates a range of possible CATE values when given a predefined bound on the level of hidden confounding. Further, previous interval estimators do not account for ignorance about the CATE associated with samples that may be underrepresented in the original study, or samples that violate the overlap assumption. Our interval estimator also incorporates model uncertainty so that practitioners can be made aware of out-of-distribution data. We prove that our estimator converges to tight bounds on CATE when there may be unobserved confounding, and assess it using semi-synthetic, high-dimensional datasets.

(0 min) Diffusion models have recently shown great promise for generative modeling, outperforming GANs on perceptual quality and autoregressive models at density estimation. A remaining downside is their slow sampling time: generating high quality samples takes many hundreds or thousands of model evaluations. Here we make two contributions to help eliminate this downside: First, we present new parameterizations of diffusion models that provide increased stability when using few sampling steps. Second, we present a method to distill a trained deterministic diffusion sampler, using many steps, into a new diffusion model that takes half as many sampling steps. We then keep progressively applying this distillation procedure to our model, halving the number of required sampling steps each time. On standard image generation benchmarks like CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and LSUN, we start out with state-of-the-art samplers taking as many as 8192 steps, and are able to distill down to models taking as few as 4 steps without losing much perceptual quality; achieving, for example, a FID of 3.0 on CIFAR-10 in 4 steps. Finally, we show that the full progressive distillation procedure does not take more time than it takes to train the original model, thus representing an efficient solution for generative modeling using diffusion at both train and test time.

(0 min) Similarity metrics such as representational similarity analysis (RSA) and centered kernel alignment (CKA) have been used to compare layer-wise representations between neural networks. However, these metrics are confounded by the population structure of data items in the input space, leading to spuriously high similarity for even completely random neural networks and inconsistent domain relations in transfer learning. We introduce a simple and generally applicable fix to adjust for the confounder with covariate adjustment regression, which retains the intuitive invariance properties of the original similarity measures. We show that deconfounding the similarity metrics increases the resolution of detecting semantically similar neural networks. Moreover, in real-world applications, deconfounding improves the consistency of representation similarities with domain similarities in transfer learning, and increases correlation with out-of-distribution accuracy.

(2 min) Any reasonable machine learning (ML) model should not only interpolate efficiently in between the training samples provided (in-distribution region), but also approach the extrapolative or out-of-distribution (OOD) region without being overconfident. Our experiment on human subjects justifies the aforementioned properties for human intelligence as well. Many state-of-the-art algorithms have tried to fix the overconfidence problem of ML models in the OOD region. However, in doing so, they have often impaired the in-distribution performance of the model. Our key insight is that ML models partition the feature space into polytopes and learn constant (random forests) or affine (ReLU networks) functions over those polytopes. This leads to the OOD overconfidence problem for the polytopes which lie in the training data boundary and extend to infinity. To resolve this issue, we propose kernel density methods that fit Gaussian kernel over the polytopes, which are learned using ML models. Specifically, we introduce two variants of kernel density polytopes: Kernel Density Forest (KDF) and Kernel Density Network (KDN) based on random forests and deep networks, respectively. Studies on various simulation settings show that both KDF and KDN achieve uniform confidence over the classes in the OOD region while maintaining good in-distribution accuracy compared to that of their respective parent models.

(2 min) A key challenge facing deep learning is that neural networks are often not robust to shifts in the underlying data distribution. We study this problem from the perspective of the statistical concept of parameter identification. Generalization bounds from learning theory often assume that the test distribution is close to the training distribution. In contrast, if we can identify the "true" parameters, then the model generalizes to arbitrary distribution shifts. However, neural networks typically have internal symmetries that make parameter identification impossible. We show that we can identify the function represented by a quadratic network even though we cannot identify its parameters; we extend this result to neural networks with ReLU activations. Thus, we can obtain robust generalization bounds for neural networks. We leverage this result to obtain new bounds for contextual bandits and transfer learning with quadratic neural networks. Overall, our results suggest that we can improve robustness of neural networks by designing models that can represent the true data generating process.

(2 min) In distributional reinforcement learning not only expected returns but the complete return distributions of a policy is taken into account. The return distribution for a fixed policy is given as the fixed point of an associated distributional Bellman operator. In this note we consider general distributional Bellman operators and study existence and uniqueness of its fixed points as well as their tail properties. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of return distributions and identify cases of regular variation. We link distributional Bellman equations to multivariate distributional equations of the form $\textbf{X} =_d \textbf{A}\textbf{X} + \textbf{B}$, where $\textbf{X}$ and $\textbf{B}$ are $d$-dimensional random vectors, $\textbf{A}$ a random $d\times d$ matrix and $\textbf{X}$ and $(\textbf{A},\textbf{B})$ are independent. We show that any fixed-point of a distributional Bellman operator can be obtained as the vector of marginal laws of a solution to such a multivariate distributional equation. This makes the general theory of such equations applicable to the distributional reinforcement learning setting.

(2 min) Tensor completion aims at imputing missing entries from a partially observed tensor. Existing tensor completion methods often assume either multi-linear or nonlinear relationships between latent components. However, real-world tensors have much more complex patterns where both multi-linear and nonlinear relationships may coexist. In such cases, the existing methods are insufficient to describe the data structure. This paper proposes a Joint mUlti-linear and nonLinear IdentificAtion (JULIA) framework for large-scale tensor completion. JULIA unifies the multi-linear and nonlinear tensor completion models with several advantages over the existing methods: 1) Flexible model selection, i.e., it fits a tensor by assigning its values as a combination of multi-linear and nonlinear components; 2) Compatible with existing nonlinear tensor completion methods; 3) Efficient training based on a well-designed alternating optimization approach. Experiments on six real large-scale tensors demonstrate that JULIA outperforms many existing tensor completion algorithms. Furthermore, JULIA can improve the performance of a class of nonlinear tensor completion methods. The results show that in some large-scale tensor completion scenarios, baseline methods with JULIA are able to obtain up to 55% lower root mean-squared-error and save 67% computational complexity.

(2 min) Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory is widely used to study the dynamics of infinitely-wide deep neural networks (DNNs) under gradient descent. But do the results for infinitely-wide networks give us hints about the behavior of real finite-width ones? In this paper, we study empirically when NTK theory is valid in practice for fully-connected ReLU and sigmoid DNNs. We find out that whether a network is in the NTK regime depends on the hyperparameters of random initialization and the network's depth. In particular, NTK theory does not explain the behavior of sufficiently deep networks initialized so that their gradients explode as they propagate through the network's layers: the kernel is random at initialization and changes significantly during training in this case, contrary to NTK theory. On the other hand, in the case of vanishing gradients, DNNs are in the the NTK regime but become untrainable rapidly with depth. We also describe a framework to study generalization properties of DNNs, in particular the variance of network's output function, by means of NTK theory and discuss its limits.

(3 min) In DP-SGD each round communicates a local SGD update which leaks some new information about the underlying local data set to the outside world. In order to provide privacy, Gaussian noise with standard deviation $\sigma$ is added to local SGD updates after performing a clipping operation. We show that for attaining $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy $\sigma$ can be chosen equal to $\sqrt{2(\epsilon +\ln(1/\delta))/\epsilon}$ for $\epsilon=\Omega(T/N^2)$, where $T$ is the total number of rounds and $N$ is equal to the size of the local data set. In many existing machine learning problems, $N$ is always large and $T=O(N)$. Hence, $\sigma$ becomes "independent" of any $T=O(N)$ choice with $\epsilon=\Omega(1/N)$. This means that our $\sigma$ only depends on $N$ rather than $T$. As shown in our paper, this differential privacy characterization allows one to {\it a-priori} select parameters of DP-SGD based on a fixed privacy budget (in terms of $\epsilon$ and $\delta$) in such a way to optimize the anticipated utility (test accuracy) the most. This ability of planning ahead together with $\sigma$'s independence of $T$ (which allows local gradient computations to be split among as many rounds as needed, even for large $T$ as usually happens in practice) leads to a {\it proactive DP-SGD algorithm} that allows a client to balance its privacy budget with the accuracy of the learned global model based on local test data. We notice that the current state-of-the art differential privacy accountant method based on $f$-DP has a closed form for computing the privacy loss for DP-SGD. However, due to its interpretation complexity, it cannot be used in a simple way to plan ahead. Instead, accountant methods are only used for keeping track of how privacy budget has been spent (after the fact).

(2 min) We describe a graph-based neural acceleration technique for nonnegative matrix factorization that builds upon a connection between matrices and bipartite graphs that is well-known in certain fields, e.g., sparse linear algebra, but has not yet been exploited to design graph neural networks for matrix computations. We first consider low-rank factorization more broadly and propose a graph representation of the problem suited for graph neural networks. Then, we focus on the task of nonnegative matrix factorization and propose a graph neural network that interleaves bipartite self-attention layers with updates based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. Our empirical evaluation on synthetic and two real-world datasets shows that we attain substantial acceleration, even though we only train in an unsupervised fashion on smaller synthetic instances.

(2 min) In this paper, we question the rationale behind propagating large numbers of parameters through a distributed system during federated learning. We start by examining the rank characteristics of the subspace spanned by gradients across epochs (i.e., the gradient-space) in centralized model training, and observe that this gradient-space often consists of a few leading principal components accounting for an overwhelming majority (95-99%) of the explained variance. Motivated by this, we propose the "Look-back Gradient Multiplier" (LBGM) algorithm, which exploits this low-rank property to enable gradient recycling between model update rounds of federated learning, reducing transmissions of large parameters to single scalars for aggregation. We analytically characterize the convergence behavior of LBGM, revealing the nature of the trade-off between communication savings and model performance. Our subsequent experimental results demonstrate the improvement LBGM obtains in communication overhead compared to conventional federated learning on several datasets and deep learning models. Additionally, we show that LBGM is a general plug-and-play algorithm that can be used standalone or stacked on top of existing sparsification techniques for distributed model training.

(2 min) Simulation models, in particular agent-based models, are gaining popularity in economics. The considerable flexibility they offer, as well as their capacity to reproduce a variety of empirically observed behaviours of complex systems, give them broad appeal, and the increasing availability of cheap computing power has made their use feasible. Yet a widespread adoption in real-world modelling and decision-making scenarios has been hindered by the difficulty of performing parameter estimation for such models. In general, simulation models lack a tractable likelihood function, which precludes a straightforward application of standard statistical inference techniques. Several recent works have sought to address this problem through the application of likelihood-free inference techniques, in which parameter estimates are determined by performing some form of comparison between the observed data and simulation output. However, these approaches are (a) founded on restrictive assumptions, and/or (b) typically require many hundreds of thousands of simulations. These qualities make them unsuitable for large-scale simulations in economics and can cast doubt on the validity of these inference methods in such scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of two classes of black-box approximate Bayesian inference methods that have recently drawn significant attention within the probabilistic machine learning community: neural posterior estimation and neural density ratio estimation. We present benchmarking experiments in which we demonstrate that neural network based black-box methods provide state of the art parameter inference for economic simulation models, and crucially are compatible with generic multivariate time-series data. In addition, we suggest appropriate assessment criteria for future benchmarking of approximate Bayesian inference procedures for economic simulation models.

(2 min) Normalizing Flows (NFs) are universal density estimators based on Neural Networks. However, this universality is limited: the density's support needs to be diffeomorphic to a Euclidean space. In this paper, we propose a novel method to overcome this limitation without sacrificing universality. The proposed method inflates the data manifold by adding noise in the normal space, trains an NF on this inflated manifold, and, finally, deflates the learned density. Our main result provides sufficient conditions on the manifold and the specific choice of noise under which the corresponding estimator is exact. Our method has the same computational complexity as NFs and does not require computing an inverse flow. We also show that, if the embedding dimension is much larger than the manifold dimension, noise in the normal space can be well approximated by Gaussian noise. This allows using our method for approximating arbitrary densities on unknown manifolds provided that the manifold dimension is known.

(2 min) The domain generalization (DG) problem setting challenges a model trained on multiple known data distributions to generalise well on unseen data distributions. Due to its practical importance, a large number of methods have been proposed to address this challenge. However much of the work in general purpose DG is heuristically motivated, as the DG problem is hard to model formally; and recent evaluations have cast doubt on existing methods' practical efficacy -- in particular compared to a well tuned empirical risk minimisation baseline. We present a novel learning-theoretic generalisation bound for DG that bounds unseen domain generalisation performance in terms of the model's Rademacher complexity. Based on this, we conjecture that existing methods' efficacy or lack thereof is largely determined by an empirical risk vs predictor complexity trade-off, and demonstrate that their performance variability can be explained in these terms. Algorithmically, this analysis suggests that domain generalisation should be achieved by simply performing regularised ERM with a leave-one-domain-out cross-validation objective. Empirical results on the DomainBed benchmark corroborate this.

(2 min) With the purpose of examining biased updates in variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, we introduce SVAG, a SAG/SAGA-like method with adjustable bias. SVAG is analyzed in a cocoercive root-finding setting, a setting which yields the same results as in the usual smooth convex optimization setting for the ordinary proximal-gradient method. We show that the same is not true for SVAG when biased updates are used. The step-size requirements for when the operators are gradients are significantly less restrictive compared to when they are not. This highlights the need to not rely solely on cocoercivity when analyzing variance-reduced methods meant for optimization. Our analysis either match or improve on previously known convergence conditions for SAG and SAGA. However, in the biased cases they still do not correspond well with practical experiences and we therefore examine the effect of bias numerically on a set of classification problems. The choice of bias seem to primarily affect the early stages of convergence and in most cases the differences vanish in the later stages of convergence. However, the effect of the bias choice is still significant in a couple of cases.

(2 min) Recovering global rankings from pairwise comparisons is an important problem with many applications, ranging from time synchronization to sports team ranking. Pairwise comparisons corresponding to matches in a competition can naturally be construed as edges in a directed graph (digraph), whose nodes represent competitors with an unknown rank or skill strength. However, existing methods addressing the rank estimation problem have thus far not utilized powerful neural network architectures to optimize ranking objectives. Hence, we propose to augment an algorithm with neural network, in particular graph neural network (GNN) for its coherence to the problem at hand. In this paper, we introduce GNNRank, a modeling framework that is compatible with any GNN capable of learning digraph embeddings, and we devise trainable objectives to encode ranking upsets/violations. This framework includes a ranking score estimation approach, and adds a useful inductive bias by unfolding the Fiedler vector computation of the graph constructed from a learnable similarity matrix. Experimental results on a wide range of data sets show that our methods attain competitive and often superior performance compared with existing approaches. It also shows promising transfer ability to new data based on the trained GNN model.

(2 min) There is a fundamental limitation in the prediction performance that a machine learning model can achieve due to the inevitable uncertainty of the prediction target. In classification problems, this can be characterized by the Bayes error, which is the best achievable error with any classifier. The Bayes error can be used as a criterion to evaluate classifiers with state-of-the-art performance and can be used to detect test set overfitting. We propose a simple and direct Bayes error estimator, where we just take the mean of the labels that show \emph{uncertainty} of the classes. Our flexible approach enables us to perform Bayes error estimation even for weakly supervised data. In contrast to others, our method is model-free and even instance-free. Moreover, it has no hyperparameters and gives a more accurate estimate of the Bayes error than classifier-based baselines. Experiments using our method suggest that a recently proposed classifier, the Vision Transformer, may have already reached the Bayes error for certain benchmark datasets.

(2 min) Traffic flow forecasting is a crucial task in urban computing. The challenge arises as traffic flows often exhibit intrinsic and latent spatio-temporal correlations that cannot be identified by extracting the spatial and temporal patterns of traffic data separately. We argue that such correlations are universal and play a pivotal role in traffic flow. We put forward {spacetime interval learning} as a paradigm to explicitly capture these correlations through a unified analysis of both spatial and temporal features. Unlike the state-of-the-art methods, which are restricted to a particular road network, we model the universal spatio-temporal correlations that are transferable from cities to cities. To this end, we propose a new spacetime interval learning framework that constructs a local-spacetime context of a traffic sensor comprising the data from its neighbors within close time points. Based on this idea, we introduce local spacetime neural network (STNN), which employs novel spacetime convolution and attention mechanism to learn the universal spatio-temporal correlations. The proposed STNN captures local traffic patterns, which does not depend on a specific network structure. As a result, a trained STNN model can be applied on any unseen traffic networks. We evaluate the proposed STNN on two public real-world traffic datasets and a simulated dataset on dynamic networks. The experiment results show that STNN not only improves prediction accuracy by 4% over state-of-the-art methods, but is also effective in handling the case when the traffic network undergoes dynamic changes as well as the superior generalization capability.

(2 min) In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it induces. We study the problem of finding near-optimal models under performativity while maintaining low regret. On the surface, this problem might seem equivalent to a bandit problem. However, it exhibits a fundamentally richer feedback structure that we refer to as performative feedback: after every deployment, the learner receives samples from the shifted distribution rather than only bandit feedback about the reward. Our main contribution is regret bounds that scale only with the complexity of the distribution shifts and not that of the reward function. The key algorithmic idea is careful exploration of the distribution shifts that informs a novel construction of confidence bounds on the risk of unexplored models. The construction only relies on smoothness of the shifts and does not assume convexity. More broadly, our work establishes a conceptual approach for leveraging tools from the bandits literature for the purpose of regret minimization with performative feedback.

(2 min) Estimating personalized treatment effects from high-dimensional observational data is essential in situations where experimental designs are infeasible, unethical, or expensive. Existing approaches rely on fitting deep models on outcomes observed for treated and control populations. However, when measuring individual outcomes is costly, as is the case of a tumor biopsy, a sample-efficient strategy for acquiring each result is required. Deep Bayesian active learning provides a framework for efficient data acquisition by selecting points with high uncertainty. However, existing methods bias training data acquisition towards regions of non-overlapping support between the treated and control populations. These are not sample-efficient because the treatment effect is not identifiable in such regions. We introduce causal, Bayesian acquisition functions grounded in information theory that bias data acquisition towards regions with overlapping support to maximize sample efficiency for learning personalized treatment effects. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed acquisition strategies on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets IHDP and CMNIST and their extensions, which aim to simulate common dataset biases and pathologies.

(2 min) Posterior predictive distributions quantify uncertainties ignored by point estimates. This paper introduces The Neural Testbed: an opensource library for controlled and principled evaluation of agents that generate such predictions. Crucially, agents are assessed not only on the quality of their marginal predictions per input, but also on their joint predictions across many inputs. We evaluate a range of agents using a neural-network-based data generating process. Our results indicate that some well-known agents that produce accurate marginal predictions do not fare well with joint predictions. We show that the quality of joint predictions drives performance in downstream decision tasks, and highlight the importance of this observation to the community.

(2 min) Obtaining reliable, adaptive confidence sets for prediction functions (hypotheses) is a central challenge in sequential decision-making tasks, such as bandits and model-based reinforcement learning. These confidence sets typically rely on prior assumptions on the hypothesis space, e.g., the known kernel of a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Hand-designing such kernels is error prone, and misspecification may lead to poor or unsafe performance. In this work, we propose to meta-learn a kernel from offline data (Meta-KeL). For the case where the unknown kernel is a combination of known base kernels, we develop an estimator based on structured sparsity. Under mild conditions, we guarantee that our estimated RKHS yields valid confidence sets that, with increasing amounts of offline data, become as tight as those given the true unknown kernel. We demonstrate our approach on the kernelized bandit problem (a.k.a.~Bayesian optimization), where we establish regret bounds competitive with those given the true kernel. We also empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a Bayesian optimization task.

(2 min) We present a conceptual framework, datamodeling, for analyzing the behavior of a model class in terms of the training data. For any fixed "target" example $x$, training set $S$, and learning algorithm, a datamodel is a parameterized function $2^S \to \mathbb{R}$ that for any subset of $S' \subset S$ -- using only information about which examples of $S$ are contained in $S'$ -- predicts the outcome of training a model on $S'$ and evaluating on $x$. Despite the potential complexity of the underlying process being approximated (e.g., end-to-end training and evaluation of deep neural networks), we show that even simple linear datamodels can successfully predict model outputs. We then demonstrate that datamodels give rise to a variety of applications, such as: accurately predicting the effect of dataset counterfactuals; identifying brittle predictions; finding semantically similar examples; quantifying train-test leakage; and embedding data into a well-behaved and feature-rich representation space. Data for this paper (including pre-computed datamodels as well as raw predictions from four million trained deep neural networks) is available at https://github.com/MadryLab/datamodels-data .

(2 min) Anomalies (or outliers) are prevalent in real-world empirical observations and potentially mask important underlying structures. Accurate identification of anomalous samples is crucial for the success of downstream data analysis tasks. To automatically identify anomalies, we propose Probabilistic Robust AutoEncoder (PRAE). PRAE is designed to simultaneously remove outliers and identify a low-dimensional representation for the inlier samples. We first present the Robust AutoEncoder (RAE) intractable objective as a minimization problem for splitting the data to inlier samples from which a low dimensional representation is learned via an AutoEncoder (AE), and anomalous (outlier) samples that are excluded as they do not fit the low dimensional representation. RAE minimizes the autoencoder's reconstruction error while incorporating as many samples as possible. This could be formulated via regularization by subtracting from the reconstruction term an $\ell_0$ norm counting the number of selected samples. Unfortunately, this leads to an intractable combinatorial problem. Therefore, we propose two probabilistic relaxations of RAE, which are differentiable and alleviate the need for a combinatorial search. We prove that the solution to the PRAE problem is equivalent to the solution of RAE. We use synthetic data to show that PRAE can accurately remove outliers in a wide range of contamination frequencies. Finally, we demonstrate that using PRAE for anomaly detection leads to state-of-the-art results on various benchmark datasets.

(2 min) Exploiting data invariances is crucial for efficient learning in both artificial and biological neural circuits. Understanding how neural networks can discover appropriate representations capable of harnessing the underlying symmetries of their inputs is thus crucial in machine learning and neuroscience. Convolutional neural networks, for example, were designed to exploit translation symmetry and their capabilities triggered the first wave of deep learning successes. However, learning convolutions directly from translation-invariant data with a fully-connected network has so far proven elusive. Here, we show how initially fully-connected neural networks solving a discrimination task can learn a convolutional structure directly from their inputs, resulting in localised, space-tiling receptive fields. These receptive fields match the filters of a convolutional network trained on the same task. By carefully designing data models for the visual scene, we show that the emergence of this pattern is triggered by the non-Gaussian, higher-order local structure of the inputs, which has long been recognised as the hallmark of natural images. We provide an analytical and numerical characterisation of the pattern-formation mechanism responsible for this phenomenon in a simple model, which results in an unexpected link between receptive field formation and the tensor decomposition of higher-order input correlations. These results provide a new perspective on the development of low-level feature detectors in various sensory modalities, and pave the way for studying the impact of higher-order statistics on learning in neural networks.

(2 min) We challenge a common assumption underlying most supervised deep learning: that a model makes a prediction depending only on its parameters and the features of a single input. To this end, we introduce a general-purpose deep learning architecture that takes as input the entire dataset instead of processing one datapoint at a time. Our approach uses self-attention to reason about relationships between datapoints explicitly, which can be seen as realizing non-parametric models using parametric attention mechanisms. However, unlike conventional non-parametric models, we let the model learn end-to-end from the data how to make use of other datapoints for prediction. Empirically, our models solve cross-datapoint lookup and complex reasoning tasks unsolvable by traditional deep learning models. We show highly competitive results on tabular data, early results on CIFAR-10, and give insight into how the model makes use of the interactions between points.

(2 min) Shuffle model of differential privacy is a novel distributed privacy model based on a combination of local privacy mechanisms and a secure shuffler. It has been shown that the additional randomisation provided by the shuffler improves privacy bounds compared to the purely local mechanisms. Accounting tight bounds, however, is complicated by the complexity brought by the shuffler. The recently proposed numerical techniques for evaluating $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy guarantees have been shown to give tighter bounds than commonly used methods for compositions of various complex mechanisms. In this paper, we show how to obtain accurate bounds for adaptive compositions of general $\varepsilon$-LDP shufflers using the analysis by Feldman et al. (2021) and tight bounds for adaptive compositions of shufflers of $k$-randomised response mechanisms, using the analysis by Balle et al. (2019). We show how to speed up the evaluation of the resulting privacy loss distribution from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n)$, where $n$ is the number of users, without noticeable change in the resulting $\delta(\varepsilon)$-upper bounds. We also demonstrate looseness of the existing bounds and methods found in the literature, improving previous composition results significantly.

(2 min) Learning is a distinctive feature of intelligent behaviour. High-throughput experimental data and Big Data promise to open new windows on complex systems such as cells, the brain or our societies. Yet, the puzzling success of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning shows that we still have a poor conceptual understanding of learning. These applications push statistical inference into uncharted territories where data is high-dimensional and scarce, and prior information on "true" models is scant if not totally absent. Here we review recent progress on understanding learning, based on the notion of "relevance". The relevance, as we define it here, quantifies the amount of information that a dataset or the internal representation of a learning machine contains on the generative model of the data. This allows us to define maximally informative samples, on one hand, and optimal learning machines on the other. These are ideal limits of samples and of machines, that contain the maximal amount of information about the unknown generative process, at a given resolution (or level of compression). Both ideal limits exhibit critical features in the statistical sense: Maximally informative samples are characterised by a power-law frequency distribution (statistical criticality) and optimal learning machines by an anomalously large susceptibility. The trade-off between resolution (i.e. compression) and relevance distinguishes the regime of noisy representations from that of lossy compression. These are separated by a special point characterised by Zipf's law statistics. This identifies samples obeying Zipf's law as the most compressed loss-less representations that are optimal in the sense of maximal relevance. Criticality in optimal learning machines manifests in an exponential degeneracy of energy levels, that leads to unusual thermodynamic properties.

(2 min) Iterative regularization exploits the implicit bias of an optimization algorithm to regularize ill-posed problems. Constructing algorithms with such built-in regularization mechanisms is a classic challenge in inverse problems but also in modern machine learning, where it provides both a new perspective on algorithms analysis, and significant speed-ups compared to explicit regularization. In this work, we propose and study the first iterative regularization procedure able to handle biases described by non smooth and non strongly convex functionals, prominent in low-complexity regularization. Our approach is based on a primal-dual algorithm of which we analyze convergence and stability properties, even in the case where the original problem is unfeasible. The general results are illustrated considering the special case of sparse recovery with the $\ell_1$ penalty. Our theoretical results are complemented by experiments showing the computational benefits of our approach.

(2 min) In most real-world applications, it is seldom the case that a given observable evolves independently of its environment. In social networks, users' behavior results from the people they interact with, news in their feed, or trending topics. In natural language, the meaning of phrases emerges from the combination of words. In general medicine, a diagnosis is established on the basis of the interaction of symptoms. Here, we propose a new model, the Interactive Mixed Membership Stochastic Block Model (IMMSBM), which investigates the role of interactions between entities (hashtags, words, memes, etc.) and quantifies their importance within the aforementioned corpora. We find that interactions play an important role in those corpora. In inference tasks, taking them into account leads to average relative changes with respect to non-interactive models of up to 150\% in the probability of an outcome. Furthermore, their role greatly improves the predictive power of the model. Our findings suggest that neglecting interactions when modeling real-world phenomena might lead to incorrect conclusions being drawn.

(2 min) What is the best way to exploit extra data -- be it unlabeled data from the same task, or labeled data from a related task -- to learn a given task? This paper formalizes the question using the theory of reference priors. Reference priors are objective, uninformative Bayesian priors that maximize the mutual information between the task and the weights of the model. Such priors enable the task to maximally affect the Bayesian posterior, e.g., reference priors depend upon the number of samples available for learning the task and for very small sample sizes, the prior puts more probability mass on low-complexity models in the hypothesis space. This paper presents the first demonstration of reference priors for medium-scale deep networks and image-based data. We develop generalizations of reference priors and demonstrate applications to two problems. First, by using unlabeled data to compute the reference prior, we develop new Bayesian semi-supervised learning methods that remain effective even with very few samples per class. Second, by using labeled data from the source task to compute the reference prior, we develop a new pretraining method for transfer learning that allows data from the target task to maximally affect the Bayesian posterior. Empirical validation of these methods is conducted on image classification datasets.

(2 min) Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) enables statistical inference in complex models whose likelihoods are difficult to calculate but easy to simulate from. ABC constructs a kernel-type approximation to the posterior distribution through an accept/reject mechanism which compares summary statistics of real and simulated data. To obviate the need for summary statistics, we directly compare empirical distributions with a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence estimator obtained via classification. In particular, we blend flexible machine learning classifiers within ABC to automate fake/real data comparisons. We consider the traditional accept/reject kernel as well as an exponential weighting scheme which does not require the ABC acceptance threshold. Our theoretical results show that the rate at which our ABC posterior distributions concentrate around the true parameter depends on the estimation error of the classifier. We derive limiting posterior shape results and find that, with a properly scaled exponential kernel, asymptotic normality holds. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on simulated examples as well as real data in the context of stock volatility estimation.

(2 min) Despite the non-convex optimization landscape, over-parametrized shallow networks are able to achieve global convergence under gradient descent. The picture can be radically different for narrow networks, which tend to get stuck in badly-generalizing local minima. Here we investigate the cross-over between these two regimes in the high-dimensional setting, and in particular investigate the connection between the so-called mean-field/hydrodynamic regime and the seminal approach of Saad & Solla. Focusing on the case of Gaussian data, we study the interplay between the learning rate, the time scale, and the number of hidden units in the high-dimensional dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Our work builds on a deterministic description of SGD in high-dimensions from statistical physics, which we extend and for which we provide rigorous convergence rates.

(1 min) submitted by /u/GR9100 [link] [comments]

(1 min) As the title says: I'd like to know how these libraries compare to each other. Which purpose do they serve? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Can they be used for professional purposes or are they mostly educational/only for "easy" environments? Context: I'd like to compare the performance of different algorithms on my (not easy) environment. The algorithm needs to be fast cause training will be long (over very large number of samples). Parallelization is also very welcome. But more generally I'd just like to know what each of these libraries is good at. submitted by /u/RatonneLaveuse [link] [comments]

(0 min) In online learning problems, exploiting low variance plays an important role in obtaining tight performance guarantees yet is challenging because variances are often not known a priori. Recently, considerable progress has been made by Zhang et al. (2021) where they obtain a variance-adaptive regret bound for linear bandits without knowledge of the variances and a horizon-free regret bound for linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this paper, we present novel analyses that improve their regret bounds significantly. For linear bandits, we achieve $\tilde O(d^{1.5}\sqrt{\sum_{k}^K \sigma_k^2} + d^2)$ where $d$ is the dimension of the features, $K$ is the time horizon, and $\sigma_k^2$ is the noise variance at time step $k$, and $\tilde O$ ignores polylogarithmic dependence, which is a factor of $d^3$ improvement. For linear mixture MDPs with the assumption of maximum cumulative reward in an episode being in $[0,1]$, we achieve a horizon-free regret bound of $\tilde O(d \sqrt{K} + d^2)$ where $d$ is the number of base models and $K$ is the number of episodes. This is a factor of $d^{3.5}$ improvement in the leading term and $d^7$ in the lower order term. Our analysis critically relies on a novel elliptical potential `count' lemma. This lemma allows a novel regret analysis in conjunction with the peeling trick, which is of independent interest.

(0 min) We show that density models describing multiple observables with (i) hard boundaries and (ii) dependence on external parameters may be created using an auto-regressive Gaussian mixture model. The model is designed to capture how observable spectra are deformed by hypothesis variations, and is made more expressive by projecting data onto a configurable latent space. It may be used as a statistical model for scientific discovery in interpreting experimental observations, for example when constraining the parameters of a physical model or tuning simulation parameters according to calibration data. The model may also be sampled for use within a Monte Carlo simulation chain, or used to estimate likelihood ratios for event classification. The method is demonstrated on simulated high-energy particle physics data considering the anomalous electroweak production of a $Z$ boson in association with a dijet system at the Large Hadron Collider, and the accuracy of inference is tested using a realistic toy example. The developed methods are domain agnostic; they may be used within any field to perform simulation or inference where a dataset consisting of many real-valued observables has conditional dependence on external parameters.

(0 min) A few-shot generative model should be able to generate data from a distribution by only observing a limited set of examples. In few-shot learning the model is trained on data from many sets from different distributions sharing some underlying properties such as sets of characters from different alphabets or sets of images of different type objects. We extend current latent variable models for sets to a fully hierarchical approach with an attention-based point to set-level aggregation and call our approach SCHA-VAE for Set-Context-Hierarchical-Aggregation Variational Autoencoder. We explore iterative data sampling, likelihood-based model comparison, and adaptation-free out of distribution generalization. Our results show that the hierarchical formulation better captures the intrinsic variability within the sets in the small data regime. With this work we generalize deep latent variable approaches to few-shot learning, taking a step towards large-scale few-shot generation with a formulation that readily can work with current state-of-the-art deep generative models.

(0 min) There remain many open questions pertaining to the scaling behaviour of Transformer architectures. These scaling decisions and findings can be critical, as training runs often come with an associated computational cost which have both financial and/or environmental impact. The goal of this paper is to present scaling insights from pretraining and finetuning Transformers. While Kaplan et al. presents a comprehensive study of the scaling behaviour of Transformer language models, the scope is only on the upstream (pretraining) loss. Therefore, it is still unclear if these set of findings transfer to downstream task within the context of the pretrain-finetune paradigm. The key findings of this paper are as follows: (1) we show that aside from only the model size, model shape matters for downstream fine-tuning, (2) scaling protocols operate differently at different compute regions, (3) widely adopted T5-base and T5-large sizes are Pareto-inefficient. To this end, we present improved scaling protocols whereby our redesigned models achieve similar downstream fine-tuning quality while having 50\% fewer parameters and training 40\% faster compared to the widely adopted T5-base model. We publicly release over 100 pretrained checkpoints of different T5 configurations to facilitate future research and analysis.

(0 min) We introduce vector optimization problems with stochastic bandit feedback, which extends the best arm identification problem to vector-valued rewards. We consider $K$ designs, with multi-dimensional mean reward vectors, which are partially ordered according to a polyhedral ordering cone $C$. This generalizes the concept of Pareto set in multi-objective optimization and allows different sets of preferences of decision-makers to be encoded by $C$. Different than prior work, we define approximations of the Pareto set based on direction-free covering and gap notions. We study the setting where an evaluation of each design yields a noisy observation of the mean reward vector. Under subgaussian noise assumption, we investigate the sample complexity of the na\"ive elimination algorithm in an ($\epsilon,\delta$)-PAC setting, where the goal is to identify an ($\epsilon,\delta$)-PAC Pareto set with the minimum number of design evaluations. In order to characterize the difficulty of learning the Pareto set, we introduce the concept of ordering complexity, i.e., geometric conditions on the deviations of empirical reward vectors from their mean under which the Pareto front can be approximated accurately. We show how to compute the ordering complexity of any polyhedral ordering cone. We run experiments to verify our theoretical results and illustrate how $C$ and sampling budget affect the Pareto set, returned ($\epsilon,\delta$)-PAC Pareto set and the success of identification.

(0 min) Automated design synthesis has the potential to revolutionize the modern engineering design process and improve access to highly optimized and customized products across countless industries. Successfully adapting generative Machine Learning to design engineering may enable such automated design synthesis and is a research subject of great importance. We present a review and analysis of Deep Generative Machine Learning models in engineering design. Deep Generative Models (DGMs) typically leverage deep networks to learn from an input dataset and synthesize new designs. Recently, DGMs such as feedforward Neural Networks (NNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and certain Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) frameworks have shown promising results in design applications like structural optimization, materials design, and shape synthesis. The prevalence of DGMs in engineering design has skyrocketed since 2016. Anticipating continued growth, we conduct a review of recent advances to benefit researchers interested in DGMs for design. We structure our review as an exposition of the algorithms, datasets, representation methods, and applications commonly used in the current literature. In particular, we discuss key works that have introduced new techniques and methods in DGMs, successfully applied DGMs to a design-related domain, or directly supported the development of DGMs through datasets or auxiliary methods. We further identify key challenges and limitations currently seen in DGMs across design fields, such as design creativity, handling constraints and objectives, and modeling both form and functional performance simultaneously. In our discussion, we identify possible solution pathways as key areas on which to target future work.

(0 min) To successfully tackle challenging manipulation tasks, autonomous agents must learn a diverse set of skills and how to combine them. Recently, self-supervised agents that set their own abstract goals by exploiting the discovered structure in the environment were shown to perform well on many different tasks. In particular, some of them were applied to learn basic manipulation skills in compositional multi-object environments. However, these methods learn skills without taking the dependencies between objects into account. Thus, the learned skills are difficult to combine in realistic environments. We propose a novel self-supervised agent that estimates relations between environment components and uses them to independently control different parts of the environment state. In addition, the estimated relations between objects can be used to decompose a complex goal into a compatible sequence of subgoals. We show that, by using this framework, an agent can efficiently and automatically learn manipulation tasks in multi-object environments with different relations between objects.

(0 min) To overcome topological constraints and improve the expressiveness of normalizing flow architectures, Wu, K\"ohler and No\'e introduced stochastic normalizing flows which combine deterministic, learnable flow transformations with stochastic sampling methods. In this paper, we consider stochastic normalizing flows from a Markov chain point of view. In particular, we replace transition densities by general Markov kernels and establish proofs via Radon-Nikodym derivatives which allows to incorporate distributions without densities in a sound way. Further, we generalize the results for sampling from posterior distributions as required in inverse problems. The performance of the proposed conditional stochastic normalizing flow is demonstrated by numerical examples.

(0 min) Biological spiking neural networks (SNNs) can temporally encode information in their outputs, e.g. in the rank order in which neurons fire, whereas artificial neural networks (ANNs) conventionally do not. As a result, models of SNNs for neuromorphic computing are regarded as potentially more rapid and efficient than ANNs when dealing with temporal input. On the other hand, ANNs are simpler to train, and usually achieve superior performance. Here we show that temporal coding such as rank coding (RC) inspired by SNNs can also be applied to conventional ANNs such as LSTMs, and leads to computational savings and speedups. In our RC for ANNs, we apply backpropagation through time using the standard real-valued activations, but only from a strategically early time step of each sequential input example, decided by a threshold-crossing event. Learning then incorporates naturally also _when_ to produce an output, without other changes to the model or the algorithm. Both the forward and the backward training pass can be significantly shortened by skipping the remaining input sequence after that first event. RC-training also significantly reduces time-to-insight during inference, with a minimal decrease in accuracy. The desired speed-accuracy trade-off is tunable by varying the threshold or a regularization parameter that rewards output entropy. We demonstrate these in two toy problems of sequence classification, and in a temporally-encoded MNIST dataset where our RC model achieves 99.19% accuracy after the first input time-step, outperforming the state of the art in temporal coding with SNNs, as well as in spoken-word classification of Google Speech Commands, outperforming non-RC-trained early inference with LSTMs.

(0 min) A well-studied challenge that arises in the structure learning problem of causal directed acyclic graphs (DAG) is that using observational data, one can only learn the graph up to a "Markov equivalence class" (MEC). The remaining undirected edges have to be oriented using interventions, which can be very expensive to perform in applications. Thus, the problem of minimizing the number of interventions needed to fully orient the MEC has received a lot of recent attention, and is also the focus of this work. We prove two main results. The first is a new universal lower bound on the number of atomic interventions that any algorithm (whether active or passive) would need to perform in order to orient a given MEC. Our second result shows that this bound is, in fact, within a factor of two of the size of the smallest set of atomic interventions that can orient the MEC. Our lower bound is provably better than previously known lower bounds. The proof of our lower bound is based on the new notion of clique-block shared-parents (CBSP) orderings, which are topological orderings of DAGs without v-structures and satisfy certain special properties. Further, using simulations on synthetic graphs and by giving examples of special graph families, we show that our bound is often significantly better.

(0 min) We consider K-armed bandit problem in general graphs where agents are arbitrarily connected and each of them has limited memorization and communication bandwidth. The goal is to let each of the agents learn the best arm. Although recent studies show the power of collaboration among the agents in improving the efficacy of learning, it is assumed in these studies that the communication graphs should be complete or well-structured, whereas such an assumption is not always valid in practice. Furthermore, limited memorization and communication bandwidth also restrict the collaborations of the agents, since very few knowledge can be drawn by each agent from its experiences or the ones shared by its peers in this case. Additionally, the agents may be corrupted to share falsified experience, while the resource limit may considerably restrict the reliability of the learning process. To address the above issues, we propose a three-staged collaborative learning algorithm. In each step, the agents share their experience with each other through light-weight random walks in the general graphs, and then make decisions on which arms to pull according to the randomly memorized suggestions. The agents finally update their adoptions (i.e., preferences to the arms) based on the reward feedback of the arm pulling. Our theoretical analysis shows that, by exploiting the limited memorization and communication resources, all the agents eventually learn the best arm with high probability. We also reveal in our theoretical analysis the upper-bound on the number of corrupted agents our algorithm can tolerate. The efficacy of our proposed three-staged collaborative learning algorithm is finally verified by extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets.

(0 min) Arbitrary conditioning is an important problem in unsupervised learning, where we seek to model the conditional densities $p(\mathbf{x}_u \mid \mathbf{x}_o)$ that underly some data, for all possible non-intersecting subsets $o, u \subset \{1, \dots , d\}$. However, the vast majority of density estimation only focuses on modeling the joint distribution $p(\mathbf{x})$, in which important conditional dependencies between features are opaque. We propose a simple and general framework, coined Posterior Matching, that enables any Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to perform arbitrary conditioning, without modification to the VAE itself. Posterior Matching applies to the numerous existing VAE-based approaches to joint density estimation, thereby circumventing the specialized models required by previous approaches to arbitrary conditioning. We find that Posterior Matching achieves performance that is comparable or superior to current state-of-the-art methods for a variety of tasks.

(0 min) Zeroth-order optimization methods and policy gradient based first-order methods are two promising alternatives to solve reinforcement learning (RL) problems with complementary advantages. The former work with arbitrary policies, drive state-dependent and temporally-extended exploration, possess robustness-seeking property, but suffer from high sample complexity, while the latter are more sample efficient but restricted to differentiable policies and the learned policies are less robust. We propose Zeroth-Order Actor-Critic algorithm (ZOAC) that unifies these two methods into an on-policy actor-critic architecture to preserve the advantages from both. ZOAC conducts rollouts collection with timestep-wise perturbation in parameter space, first-order policy evaluation (PEV) and zeroth-order policy improvement (PIM) alternately in each iteration. We evaluate our proposed method on a range of challenging continuous control benchmarks using different types of policies, where ZOAC outperforms zeroth-order and first-order baseline algorithms.

(0 min) The goal of Approximate Query Processing (AQP) is to provide very fast but "accurate enough" results for costly aggregate queries thereby improving user experience in interactive exploration of large datasets. Recently proposed Machine-Learning based AQP techniques can provide very low latency as query execution only involves model inference as compared to traditional query processing on database clusters. However, with increase in the number of filtering predicates(WHERE clauses), the approximation error significantly increases for these methods. Analysts often use queries with a large number of predicates for insights discovery. Thus, maintaining low approximation error is important to prevent analysts from drawing misleading conclusions. In this paper, we propose ELECTRA, a predicate-aware AQP system that can answer analytics-style queries with a large number of predicates with much smaller approximation errors. ELECTRA uses a conditional generative model that learns the conditional distribution of the data and at runtime generates a small (~1000 rows) but representative sample, on which the query is executed to compute the approximate result. Our evaluations with four different baselines on three real-world datasets show that ELECTRA provides lower AQP error for large number of predicates compared to baselines.

(0 min) Unsupervised skill learning objectives (Gregor et al., 2016, Eysenbach et al., 2018) allow agents to learn rich repertoires of behavior in the absence of extrinsic rewards. They work by simultaneously training a policy to produce distinguishable latent-conditioned trajectories, and a discriminator to evaluate distinguishability by trying to infer latents from trajectories. The hope is for the agent to explore and master the environment by encouraging each skill (latent) to reliably reach different states. However, an inherent exploration problem lingers: when a novel state is actually encountered, the discriminator will necessarily not have seen enough training data to produce accurate and confident skill classifications, leading to low intrinsic reward for the agent and effective penalization of the sort of exploration needed to actually maximize the objective. To combat this inherent pessimism towards exploration, we derive an information gain auxiliary objective that involves training an ensemble of discriminators and rewarding the policy for their disagreement. Our objective directly estimates the epistemic uncertainty that comes from the discriminator not having seen enough training examples, thus providing an intrinsic reward more tailored to the true objective compared to pseudocount-based methods (Burda et al., 2019). We call this exploration bonus discriminator disagreement intrinsic reward, or DISDAIN. We demonstrate empirically that DISDAIN improves skill learning both in a tabular grid world (Four Rooms) and the 57 games of the Atari Suite (from pixels). Thus, we encourage researchers to treat pessimism with DISDAIN.

(0 min) To generalize in object-centric tasks, a reinforcement learning (RL) agent needs to exploit the structure that objects induce. Prior work has either hard-coded object-centric features, used complex object-centric generative models, or updated state using local spatial features. However, these approaches have had limited success in enabling general RL agents. Motivated by this, we introduce ``Feature-Attending Recurrent Modules'' (FARM), an architecture for learning state representations that relies on simple, broadly applicable inductive biases for capturing spatial and temporal regularities. FARM learns a state representation that is distributed across multiple modules that each attend to spatiotemporal features with an expressive feature attention mechanism. This enables FARM to represent diverse object-induced spatial and temporal regularities across subsets of modules. We hypothesize that this enables an RL agent to flexibly recombine its experiences for generalization. We study task suites in both 2D and 3D environments and find that FARM better generalizes compared to competing architectures that leverage attention or multiple modules.

(0 min) Many recent successes in sentence representation learning have been achieved by simply fine-tuning on the Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets with triplet loss or siamese loss. Nevertheless, they share a common weakness: sentences in a contradiction pair are not necessarily from different semantic categories. Therefore, optimizing the semantic entailment and contradiction reasoning objective alone is inadequate to capture the high-level semantic structure. The drawback is compounded by the fact that the vanilla siamese or triplet losses only learn from individual sentence pairs or triplets, which often suffer from bad local optima. In this paper, we propose PairSupCon, an instance discrimination based approach aiming to bridge semantic entailment and contradiction understanding with high-level categorical concept encoding. We evaluate PairSupCon on various downstream tasks that involve understanding sentence semantics at different granularities. We outperform the previous state-of-the-art method with $10\%$--$13\%$ averaged improvement on eight clustering tasks, and $5\%$--$6\%$ averaged improvement on seven semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks.

(0 min) Differential privacy is widely accepted as the de facto method for preventing data leakage in ML, and conventional wisdom suggests that it offers strong protection against privacy attacks. However, existing semantic guarantees for DP focus on membership inference, which may overestimate the adversary's capabilities and is not applicable when membership status itself is non-sensitive. In this paper, we derive the first semantic guarantees for DP mechanisms against training data reconstruction attacks under a formal threat model. We show that two distinct privacy accounting methods -- Renyi differential privacy and Fisher information leakage -- both offer strong semantic protection against data reconstruction attacks.

(0 min) Deep learning (DL) workflows demand an ever-increasing budget of compute and energy in order to achieve outsized gains. Neural architecture searches, hyperparameter sweeps, and rapid prototyping consume immense resources that can prevent resource-constrained researchers from experimenting with large models and carry considerable environmental impact. As such, it becomes essential to understand how different deep neural networks (DNNs) and training leverage increasing compute and energy resources -- especially specialized computationally-intensive models across different domains and applications. In this paper, we conduct over 3,400 experiments training an array of deep networks representing various domains/tasks -- natural language processing, computer vision, and chemistry -- on up to 424 graphics processing units (GPUs). During training, our experiments systematically vary compute resource characteristics and energy-saving mechanisms such as power utilization and GPU clock rate limits to capture and illustrate the different trade-offs and scaling behaviors each representative model exhibits under various resource and energy-constrained regimes. We fit power law models that describe how training time scales with available compute resources and energy constraints. We anticipate that these findings will help inform and guide high-performance computing providers in optimizing resource utilization, by selectively reducing energy consumption for different deep learning tasks/workflows with minimal impact on training.

(0 min) In this work, we propose an end-to-end graph network that learns forward and inverse models of particle-based physics using interpretable inductive biases. Physics-informed neural networks are often engineered to solve specific problems through problem-specific regularization and loss functions. Such explicit learning biases the network to learn data specific patterns and may require a change in the loss function or neural network architecture hereby limiting their generalizabiliy. Our graph network is implicitly biased by learning to solve several tasks, thereby sharing representations between tasks in order to learn the forward dynamics as well as infer the probability distribution of unknown particle specific properties. We evaluate our approach on one-step next state prediction tasks across diverse datasets. Our comparison against related data-driven physics learning approaches reveals that our model is able to predict the forward dynamics with at least an order of magnitude higher accuracy. We also show that our approach is able to recover multi-modal probability distributions of unknown physical parameters.

(0 min) This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average smooth. For $\mu_x$-strongly-convex-$\mu_y$-strongly-concave setting, we propose a new method which could find a $\varepsilon$-saddle point of the problem in $\tilde{\mathcal O} \big(\sqrt{n(\sqrt{n}+\kappa_x)(\sqrt{n}+\kappa_y)}\log(1/\varepsilon)\big)$ stochastic first-order complexity, where $\kappa_x\triangleq L/\mu_x$ and $\kappa_y\triangleq L/\mu_y$. This upper bound is near optimal with respect to $\varepsilon$, $n$, $\kappa_x$ and $\kappa_y$ simultaneously. In addition, the algorithm is easily implemented and works well in practical. Our methods can be extended to solve more general unbalanced convex-concave minimax problems and the corresponding upper complexity bounds are also near optimal.

(0 min) Abstract visual reasoning (AVR) domain encompasses problems solving which requires the ability to reason about relations among entities present in a given scene. While humans, generally, solve AVR tasks in a ``natural'' way, even without prior experience, this type of problems has proven difficult for current machine learning systems. The paper summarises recent progress in applying deep learning methods to solving AVR problems, as a proxy for studying machine intelligence. We focus on the most common type of AVR tasks -- the Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPMs) -- and provide a comprehensive review of the learning methods and deep neural models applied to solve RPMs, as well as, the RPM benchmark sets. Performance analysis of the state-of-the-art approaches to solving RPMs leads to formulation of certain insights and remarks on the current and future trends in this area. We conclude the paper by demonstrating how real-world problems can benefit from the discoveries of RPM studies.

(0 min) In recent years, large pre-trained Transformer-based language models have led to dramatic improvements in many natural language understanding tasks. To train these models with increasing sizes, many neural network practitioners attempt to increase the batch sizes in order to leverage multiple GPUs to improve training speed. However, increasing the batch size often makes the optimization more difficult, leading to slow convergence or poor generalization that can require orders of magnitude more training time to achieve the same model quality. In this paper, we explore the steepness of the loss landscape of large-batch optimization for adapting pre-trained Transformer-based language models to domain-specific tasks and find that it tends to be highly complex and irregular, posing challenges to generalization on downstream tasks. To tackle this challenge, we propose ScaLA, a novel and efficient method to accelerate the adaptation speed of pre-trained transformer networks. Different from prior methods, we take a sequential game-theoretic approach by adding lightweight adversarial noise into large-batch optimization, which significantly improves adaptation speed while preserving model generalization. Experiment results show that ScaLA attains 2.7--9.8$\times$ adaptation speedups over the baseline for GLUE on BERT-base and RoBERTa-large, while achieving comparable and sometimes higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art large-batch optimization methods. Finally, we also address the theoretical aspect of large-batch optimization with adversarial noise and provide a theoretical convergence rate analysis for ScaLA using techniques for analyzing non-convex saddle-point problems.

(0 min) The task we consider is portfolio construction in a speculative market, a fundamental problem in modern finance. While various empirical works now exist to explore deep learning in finance, the theory side is almost non-existent. In this work, we focus on developing a theoretical framework for understanding the use of data augmentation for deep-learning-based approaches to quantitative finance. The proposed theory clarifies the role and necessity of data augmentation for finance; moreover, our theory implies that a simple algorithm of injecting a random noise of strength $\sqrt{|r_{t-1}|}$ to the observed return $r_{t}$ is better than not injecting any noise and a few other financially irrelevant data augmentation techniques.

(0 min) Designing an effective communication mechanism among agents in reinforcement learning has been a challenging task, especially for real-world applications. The number of agents can grow or an environment sometimes needs to interact with a changing number of agents in real-world scenarios. To this end, a multi-agent framework needs to handle various scenarios of agents, in terms of both scales and dynamics, for being practical to real-world applications. We formulate the multi-agent environment with a different number of agents as a multi-tasking problem and propose a meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) framework to tackle this problem. The proposed framework employs a meta-learned Communication Pattern Recognition (CPR) module to identify communication behavior and extract information that facilitates the training process. Experimental results are poised to demonstrate that the proposed framework (a) generalizes to an unseen larger number of agents and (b) allows the number of agents to change between episodes. The ablation study is also provided to reason the proposed CPR design and show such design is effective.

(0 min) Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) RL maximizes a combination of the original task reward and an entropy reward. It is believed that the regularization imposed by entropy, on both policy improvement and policy evaluation, together contributes to good exploration, training convergence, and robustness of learned policies. This paper takes a closer look at entropy as an intrinsic reward, by conducting various ablation studies on soft actor-critic (SAC), a popular representative of MaxEnt RL. Our findings reveal that in general, entropy rewards should be applied with caution to policy evaluation. On one hand, the entropy reward, like any other intrinsic reward, could obscure the main task reward if it is not properly managed. We identify some failure cases of the entropy reward especially in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs), where it could cause the policy to be overly optimistic or pessimistic. On the other hand, our large-scale empirical study shows that using entropy regularization alone in policy improvement, leads to comparable or even better performance and robustness than using it in both policy improvement and policy evaluation. Based on these observations, we recommend either normalizing the entropy reward to a zero mean (SACZero), or simply removing it from policy evaluation (SACLite) for better practical results.

(0 min) We consider offline Imitation Learning from corrupted demonstrations where a constant fraction of data can be noise or even arbitrary outliers. Classical approaches such as Behavior Cloning assumes that demonstrations are collected by an presumably optimal expert, hence may fail drastically when learning from corrupted demonstrations. We propose a novel robust algorithm by minimizing a Median-of-Means (MOM) objective which guarantees the accurate estimation of policy, even in the presence of constant fraction of outliers. Our theoretical analysis shows that our robust method in the corrupted setting enjoys nearly the same error scaling and sample complexity guarantees as the classical Behavior Cloning in the expert demonstration setting. Our experiments on continuous-control benchmarks validate that our method exhibits the predicted robustness and effectiveness, and achieves competitive results compared to existing imitation learning methods.

(0 min) The classical Policy Iteration (PI) algorithm alternates between greedy one-step policy improvement and policy evaluation. Recent literature shows that multi-step lookahead policy improvement leads to a better convergence rate at the expense of increased complexity per iteration. However, prior to running the algorithm, one cannot tell what is the best fixed lookahead horizon. Moreover, per a given run, using a lookahead of horizon larger than one is often wasteful. In this work, we propose for the first time to dynamically adapt the multi-step lookahead horizon as a function of the state and of the value estimate. We devise two PI variants and analyze the trade-off between iteration count and computational complexity per iteration. The first variant takes the desired contraction factor as the objective and minimizes the per-iteration complexity. The second variant takes as input the computational complexity per iteration and minimizes the overall contraction factor. We then devise a corresponding DQN-based algorithm with an adaptive tree search horizon. We also include a novel enhancement for on-policy learning: per-depth value function estimator. Lastly, we demonstrate the efficacy of our adaptive lookahead method in a maze environment and in Atari.

(0 min) Cross-silo federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning approach where clients of the same interest train a global model cooperatively while keeping their local data private. The success of a cross-silo FL process requires active participation of many clients. Clients in cross-silo FL aim to optimize their long-term benefits by selfishly choosing their participation levels. While there has been some work on incentivizing clients to join FL, the analysis of clients' long-term selfish participation behaviors in cross-silo FL remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we analyze the selfish participation behaviors of heterogeneous clients in cross-silo FL. Specifically, we model clients' long-term selfish participation behaviors as an infinitely repeated game. For the stage game SPFL, we derive the unique Nash equilibrium (NE), and propose a distributed algorithm for each client to calculate its equilibrium participation strategy. We show that at the NE, clients fall into at most three categories: (i) free riders, (ii) a unique partial contributor (if exists), and (iii) contributors. For the long-term interactions among clients, we derive a cooperative strategy for clients which minimizes the number of free riders while increasing the amount of local data for model training. We show that enforced by a punishment strategy, such a cooperative strategy is a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) of the infinitely repeated game, under which some clients who are free riders at the NE of the stage game choose to be (partial) contributors. We further propose an algorithm to calculate the optimal SPNE which minimizes the number of free riders while maximizing the amount of local data for model training. Simulation results show that our derived optimal SPNE can effectively reduce the number of free riders by up to 99.3% and increase the amount of local data for model training by up to 82.3%.

(0 min) Retrosynthesis prediction is one of the fundamental challenges in organic synthesis. The task is to predict the reactants given a core product. With the advancement of machine learning, computer-aided synthesis planning has gained increasing interest. Numerous methods were proposed to solve this problem with different levels of dependency on additional chemical knowledge. In this paper, we propose Retroformer, a novel Transformer-based architecture for retrosynthesis prediction without relying on any cheminformatics tools for molecule editing. Via the proposed local attention head, the model can jointly encode the molecular sequence and graph, and efficiently exchange information between the local reactive region and the global reaction context. Retroformer reaches the new state-of-the-art accuracy for the end-to-end template-free retrosynthesis, and improves over many strong baselines on better molecule and reaction validity. In addition, its generative procedure is highly interpretable and controllable. Overall, Retroformer pushes the limits of the reaction reasoning ability of deep generative models.

(0 min) Reinforcement learning (RL), in conjunction with attack graphs and cyber terrain, are used to develop reward and state associated with determination of optimal paths for exfiltration of data in enterprise networks. This work builds on previous crown jewels (CJ) identification that focused on the target goal of computing optimal paths that adversaries may traverse toward compromising CJs or hosts within their proximity. This work inverts the previous CJ approach based on the assumption that data has been stolen and now must be quietly exfiltrated from the network. RL is utilized to support the development of a reward function based on the identification of those paths where adversaries desire reduced detection. Results demonstrate promising performance for a sizable network environment.

(0 min) Balancing privacy and predictive utility remains a central challenge for machine learning in healthcare. In this paper, we develop Syfer, a neural obfuscation method to protect against re-identification attacks. Syfer composes trained layers with random neural networks to encode the original data (e.g. X-rays) while maintaining the ability to predict diagnoses from the encoded data. The randomness in the encoder acts as the private key for the data owner. We quantify privacy as the number of attacker guesses required to re-identify a single image (guesswork). We propose a contrastive learning algorithm to estimate guesswork. We show empirically that differentially private methods, such as DP-Image, obtain privacy at a significant loss of utility. In contrast, Syfer achieves strong privacy while preserving utility. For example, X-ray classifiers built with DP-image, Syfer, and original data achieve average AUCs of 0.53, 0.78, and 0.86, respectively.

(0 min) Retrieval-based language models (R-LM) model the probability of natural language text by combining a standard language model (LM) with examples retrieved from an external datastore at test time. While effective, a major bottleneck of using these models in practice is the computationally costly datastore search, which can be performed as frequently as every time step. In this paper, we present RetoMaton -- retrieval automaton -- which approximates the datastore search, based on (1) clustering of entries into "states", and (2) state transitions from previous entries. This effectively results in a weighted finite automaton built on top of the datastore, instead of representing the datastore as a flat list. The creation of the automaton is unsupervised, and a RetoMaton can be constructed from any text collection: either the original training corpus or from another domain. Traversing this automaton at inference time, in parallel to the LM inference, reduces its perplexity, or alternatively saves up to 83% of the nearest neighbor searches over kNN-LM (Khandelwal et al., 2020), without hurting perplexity.

(0 min) In data assimilation, state estimation is not straightforward when the observation operator is unknown. This study proposes a method for composing a surrogate operator for a true operator. The surrogate model is improved iteratively to decrease the difference between the observations and the results of the surrogate model, and a neural network is adopted in the process. A twin experiment suggests that the proposed method outperforms approaches that use a specific operator that is given tentatively throughout the data assimilation process.

(0 min) The spatial and spectral degradation functions are critical to hyper- and multi-spectral image fusion. However, few work has been payed on the estimation of the degradation functions. To learn the spatial response function and the point spread function from the image pairs to be fused, we propose a Dirichlet network, where both functions are properly constrained. Specifically, the spatial response function is constrained with positivity, while the Dirichlet distribution along with a total variation is imposed on the point spread function. To the best of our knowledge, the neural netwrok and the Dirichlet regularization are exclusively investigated, for the first time, to estimate the degradation functions. Both image degradation and fusion experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed Dirichlet network.

(0 min) Learning multiple tasks sequentially without forgetting previous knowledge, called Continual Learning(CL), remains a long-standing challenge for neural networks. Most existing methods rely on additional network capacity or data replay. In contrast, we introduce a novel approach which we refer to as Recursive Gradient Optimization(RGO). RGO is composed of an iteratively updated optimizer that modifies the gradient to minimize forgetting without data replay and a virtual Feature Encoding Layer(FEL) that represents different long-term structures with only task descriptors. Experiments demonstrate that RGO has significantly better performance on popular continual classification benchmarks when compared to the baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 20-split-CIFAR100(82.22%) and 20-split-miniImageNet(72.63%). With higher average accuracy than Single-Task Learning(STL), this method is flexible and reliable to provide continual learning capabilities for learning models that rely on gradient descent.

(0 min) Value factorisation proves to be a useful technique for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in global reward game, but the underlying mechanism is not yet fully understood. This paper explores a theoretical framework for value factorisation with interpretability through Shapley value theory. We generalise Shapley value to Markov convex game called Markov Shapley value and apply it as a value factorisation method in global reward game, thanks to the equivalence between these two games. Based on the property of Markov Shapley value, we derive Shapley-Bellman optimality equation to evaluate the optimal Markov Shapley value that is corresponding to optimal joint deterministic policy. Furthermore, we propose Shapley-Bellman operator that is proved to solve Shapley-Bellman optimality equation. With stochastic approximation and some transformation, a new MARL algorithm called Shapley Q-learning (SHAQ) is yielded, the implementation of which is guided by the theoretical results of Shapley-Bellman operator and Markov Shapley value. In experiments, we show that SHAQ possesses not only superior performances on all tasks but also the interpretability that agrees with the theoretical analysis of Markov Shapley value and Shapley-Bellman operator.

(0 min) Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC) refers to the task of translating audio into a natural language that describes the audio events, source of the events and their relationships. The limited samples in AAC datasets at present, has set up a trend to incorporate transfer learning with Audio Event Detection (AED) as a parent task. Towards this direction, in this paper, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture with light-weight (i.e. with lesser learnable parameters) Bi-LSTM recurrent layers for AAC and compare the performance of two state-of-the-art pre-trained AED models as embedding extractors. Our results show that an efficient AED based embedding extractor combined with temporal attention and augmentation techniques is able to surpass existing literature with computationally intensive architectures. Further, we provide evidence of the ability of the non-uniform attention weighted encoding generated as a part of our model to facilitate the decoder glance over specific sections of the audio while generating each token.

(0 min) Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class memberships. However, most of these approaches focus on the identification of the most relevant concepts but do not provide concise, formal explanations of how such concepts are leveraged by the classifier to make predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end differentiable approach enabling the extraction of logic explanations from neural networks using the formalism of First-Order Logic. The method relies on an entropy-based criterion which automatically identifies the most relevant concepts. We consider four different case studies to demonstrate that: (i) this entropy-based criterion enables the distillation of concise logic explanations in safety-critical domains from clinical data to computer vision; (ii) the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art white-box models in terms of classification accuracy and matches black box performances.

(0 min) In this work, we study the use of the Bellman equation as a surrogate objective for value prediction accuracy. While the Bellman equation is uniquely solved by the true value function over all state-action pairs, we find that the Bellman error (the difference between both sides of the equation) is a poor proxy for the accuracy of the value function. In particular, we show that (1) due to cancellations from both sides of the Bellman equation, the magnitude of the Bellman error is only weakly related to the distance to the true value function, even when considering all state-action pairs, and (2) in the finite data regime, the Bellman equation can be satisfied exactly by infinitely many suboptimal solutions. This means that the Bellman error can be minimized without improving the accuracy of the value function. We demonstrate these phenomena through a series of propositions, illustrative toy examples, and empirical analysis in standard benchmark domains.

(0 min) Creating labeled training sets has become one of the major roadblocks in machine learning. To address this, recent Weak Supervision (WS) frameworks synthesize training labels from multiple potentially noisy supervision sources. However, existing frameworks are restricted to supervision sources that share the same output space as the target task. To extend the scope of usable sources, we formulate Weak Indirect Supervision (WIS), a new research problem for automatically synthesizing training labels based on indirect supervision sources that have different output label spaces. To overcome the challenge of mismatched output spaces, we develop a probabilistic modeling approach, PLRM, which uses user-provided label relations to model and leverage indirect supervision sources. Moreover, we provide a theoretically-principled test of the distinguishability of PLRM for unseen labels, along with a generalization bound. On both image and text classification tasks as well as an industrial advertising application, we demonstrate the advantages of PLRM by outperforming baselines by a margin of 2%-9%.

(0 min) We are interested in privatizing an approximate posterior inference algorithm called Expectation Propagation (EP). EP approximates the posterior by iteratively refining approximations to the local likelihoods, and is known to provide better posterior uncertainties than those by variational inference (VI). However, EP needs a large memory to maintain all local approximates associated with each datapoint in the training data. To overcome this challenge, stochastic expectation propagation (SEP) considers a single unique local factor that captures the average effect of each likelihood term to the posterior and refines it in a way analogous to EP. In terms of privacy, SEP is more tractable than EP because at each refining step of a factor, the remaining factors are fixed and do not depend on other datapoints as in EP, which makes the sensitivity analysis straightforward. We provide a theoretical analysis of the privacy-accuracy trade-off in the posterior estimates under our method, called differentially private stochastic expectation propagation (DP-SEP). Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of our DP-SEP algorithm evaluated on both synthetic and real-world datasets in terms of the quality of posterior estimates at different levels of guaranteed privacy.

(0 min) When deployed, AI agents will encounter problems that are beyond their autonomous problem-solving capabilities. Leveraging human assistance can help agents overcome their inherent limitations and robustly cope with unfamiliar situations. We present a general interactive framework that enables an agent to determine and request contextually useful information from an assistant, and to incorporate rich forms of responses into its decision-making process. We demonstrate the practicality of our framework on a simulated human-assisted navigation problem. Aided with an assistance-requesting policy learned by our method, a navigation agent achieves up to a 7x improvement in success rate on tasks that take place in previously unseen environments, compared to fully autonomous behavior. We show that the agent can take advantage of different types of information depending on the context, and analyze the benefits and challenges of learning the assistance-requesting policy when the assistant can recursively decompose tasks into subtasks.

(0 min) Label noise in real-world datasets encodes wrong correlation patterns and impairs the generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs). It is critical to find efficient ways to detect the corrupted patterns. Current methods primarily focus on designing robust training techniques to prevent DNNs from memorizing corrupted patterns. These approaches often require customized training processes and may overfit to corrupted patterns, leading to a performance drop in detection. In this paper, from a more data-centric perspective, we propose a training-free solution to detect corrupted labels. Intuitively, "closer" instances are more likely to share the same clean label. Based on the neighborhood information, we propose two methods: the first one uses "local voting" via checking the noisy label consensuses of nearby features. The second one is a ranking-based approach that scores each instance and filters out a guaranteed number of instances that are likely to be corrupted. We theoretically analyze how the quality of features affects the local voting and provide guidelines for tuning neighborhood size. We also prove the worst-case error bound for the ranking-based method. Experiments with both synthetic and real-world label noise demonstrate our training-free solutions are consistently and significantly improving over most of the training-based baselines. Code is available at github.com/UCSC-REAL/SimiFeat.

(0 min) We explore the problem of selectively forgetting categories from trained CNN classification models in the federated learning (FL). Given that the data used for training cannot be accessed globally in FL, our insights probe deep into the internal influence of each channel. Through the visualization of feature maps activated by different channels, we observe that different channels have a varying contribution to different categories in image classification. Inspired by this, we propose a method for scrubbing the model clean of information about particular categories. The method does not require retraining from scratch, nor global access to the data used for training. Instead, we introduce the concept of Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to quantize the class discrimination of channels. Channels with high TF-IDF scores have more discrimination on the target categories and thus need to be pruned to unlearn. The channel pruning is followed by a fine-tuning process to recover the performance of the pruned model. Evaluated on CIFAR10 dataset, our method accelerates the speed of unlearning by 8.9x for the ResNet model, and 7.9x for the VGG model under no degradation in accuracy, compared to retraining from scratch. For CIFAR100 dataset, the speedups are 9.9x and 8.4x, respectively. We envision this work as a complementary block for FL towards compliance with legal and ethical criteria.

(0 min) Reverse engineers would benefit from identifiers like function names, but these are usually unavailable in binaries. Training a machine learning model to predict function names automatically is promising but fundamentally hard due to the enormous number of classes. In this paper, we introduce eXtreme Function Labeling (XFL), an extreme multi-label learning approach to selecting appropriate labels for binary functions. XFL splits function names into tokens, treating each as an informative label akin to the problem of tagging texts in natural language. To capture the semantics of binary code, we introduce DEXTER, a novel function embedding that combines static analysis-based features with local context from the call graph and global context from the entire binary. We demonstrate that XFL outperforms state-of-the-art approaches to function labeling on a dataset of over 10,000 binaries from the Debian project, achieving a precision of 82.5%. We also study combinations of XFL with different published embeddings for binary functions and show that DEXTER consistently improves over the state of the art in information gain. As a result, we are able to show that binary function labeling is best phrased in terms of multi-label learning, and that binary function embeddings benefit from moving beyond just learning from syntax.

(0 min) We study the effects of constrained optimization formulations and Frank-Wolfe algorithms for obtaining interpretable neural network predictions. Reformulating the Rate-Distortion Explanations (RDE) method for relevance attribution as a constrained optimization problem provides precise control over the sparsity of relevance maps. This enables a novel multi-rate as well as a relevance-ordering variant of RDE that both empirically outperform standard RDE and other baseline methods in a well-established comparison test. We showcase several deterministic and stochastic variants of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm and their effectiveness for RDE.

(0 min) We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we prove that $T$ iterations of SGD with exponentially decreasing step-sizes and knowledge of the smoothness can achieve an $\tilde{O} \left(\exp \left( \frac{-T}{\kappa} \right) + \frac{\sigma^2}{T} \right)$ rate, without knowing $\sigma^2$. In order to be adaptive to the smoothness, we use a stochastic line-search (SLS) and show (via upper and lower-bounds) that SGD with SLS converges at the desired rate, but only to a neighbourhood of the solution. On the other hand, we prove that SGD with an offline estimate of the smoothness converges to the minimizer. However, its rate is slowed down proportional to the estimation error. Next, we prove that SGD with Nesterov acceleration and exponential step-sizes (referred to as ASGD) can achieve the near-optimal $\tilde{O} \left(\exp \left( \frac{-T}{\sqrt{\kappa}} \right) + \frac{\sigma^2}{T} \right)$ rate, without knowledge of $\sigma^2$. When used with offline estimates of the smoothness and strong-convexity, ASGD still converges to the solution, albeit at a slower rate. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of exponential step-sizes coupled with a novel variant of SLS.

(0 min) Kernel mean embedding is a useful tool to represent and compare probability measures. Despite its usefulness, kernel mean embedding considers infinite-dimensional features, which are challenging to handle in the context of differentially private data generation. A recent work proposes to approximate the kernel mean embedding of data distribution using finite-dimensional random features, which yields analytically tractable sensitivity. However, the number of required random features is excessively high, often ten thousand to a hundred thousand, which worsens the privacy-accuracy trade-off. To improve the trade-off, we propose to replace random features with Hermite polynomial features. Unlike the random features, the Hermite polynomial features are ordered, where the features at the low orders contain more information on the distribution than those at the high orders. Hence, a relatively low order of Hermite polynomial features can more accurately approximate the mean embedding of the data distribution compared to a significantly higher number of random features. As demonstrated on several tabular and image datasets, the use of Hermite polynomial features is better suited for private data generation than the use of random features.

(0 min) Dictionary learning consists of finding a sparse representation from noisy data and is a common way to encode data-driven prior knowledge on signals. Alternating minimization (AM) is standard for the underlying optimization, where gradient descent steps alternate with sparse coding procedures. The major drawback of this method is its prohibitive computational cost, making it unpractical on large real-world data sets. This work studies an approximate formulation of dictionary learning based on unrolling and compares it to alternating minimization to find the best trade-off between speed and precision. We analyze the asymptotic behavior and convergence rate of gradients estimates in both methods. We show that unrolling performs better on the support of the inner problem solution and during the first iterations. Finally, we apply unrolling on pattern learning in magnetoencephalography (MEG) with the help of a stochastic algorithm and compare the performance to a state-of-the-art method.

(0 min) Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods can meta-train policies that adapt to new tasks with orders of magnitude less data than standard RL, but meta-training itself is costly and time-consuming. If we can meta-train on offline data, then we can reuse the same static dataset, labeled once with rewards for different tasks, to meta-train policies that adapt to a variety of new tasks at meta-test time. Although this capability would make meta-RL a practical tool for real-world use, offline meta-RL presents additional challenges beyond online meta-RL or standard offline RL settings. Meta-RL learns an exploration strategy that collects data for adapting, and also meta-trains a policy that quickly adapts to data from a new task. Since this policy was meta-trained on a fixed, offline dataset, it might behave unpredictably when adapting to data collected by the learned exploration strategy, which differs systematically from the offline data and thus induces distributional shift. We propose a hybrid offline meta-RL algorithm, which uses offline data with rewards to meta-train an adaptive policy, and then collects additional unsupervised online data, without any reward labels to bridge this distribution shift. By not requiring reward labels for online collection, this data can be much cheaper to collect. We compare our method to prior work on offline meta-RL on simulated robot locomotion and manipulation tasks and find that using additional unsupervised online data collection leads to a dramatic improvement in the adaptive capabilities of the meta-trained policies, matching the performance of fully online meta-RL on a range of challenging domains that require generalization to new tasks.

(0 min) Connected and Automated Hybrid Electric Vehicles have the potential to reduce fuel consumption and travel time in real-world driving conditions. The eco-driving problem seeks to design optimal speed and power usage profiles based upon look-ahead information from connectivity and advanced mapping features. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been applied to the eco-driving problem. While the previous studies synthesize simulators and model-free DRL to reduce online computation, this work proposes a Safe Off-policy Model-Based Reinforcement Learning algorithm for the eco-driving problem. The advantages over the existing literature are three-fold. First, the combination of off-policy learning and the use of a physics-based model improves the sample efficiency. Second, the training does not require any extrinsic rewarding mechanism for constraint satisfaction. Third, the feasibility of trajectory is guaranteed by using a safe set approximated by deep generative models. The performance of the proposed method is benchmarked against a baseline controller representing human drivers, a previously designed model-free DRL strategy, and the wait-and-see optimal solution. In simulation, the proposed algorithm leads to a policy with a higher average speed and a better fuel economy compared to the model-free agent. Compared to the baseline controller, the learned strategy reduces the fuel consumption by more than 21\% while keeping the average speed comparable.

(0 min) Convolutional neural network (CNN) has surpassed traditional methods for medical image classification. However, CNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks which may lead to disastrous consequences in medical applications. Although adversarial noises are usually generated by attack algorithms, white-noise-induced adversarial samples can exist, and therefore the threats are real. In this study, we propose a novel training method, named IMA, to improve the robust-ness of CNN against adversarial noises. During training, the IMA method increases the margins of training samples in the input space, i.e., moving CNN decision boundaries far away from the training samples to improve robustness. The IMA method is evaluated on publicly available datasets under strong 100-PGD white-box adversarial attacks, and the results show that the proposed method significantly improved CNN classification and segmentation accuracy on noisy data while keeping a high accuracy on clean data. We hope our approach may facilitate the development of robust applications in medical field.

(0 min) Second-order methods have the capability of accelerating optimization by using much richer curvature information than first-order methods. However, most are impractical for deep learning, where the number of training parameters is huge. In Goldfarb et al. (2020), practical quasi-Newton methods were proposed that approximate the Hessian of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model by a layer-wise block diagonal matrix where each layer's block is further approximated by a Kronecker product corresponding to the structure of the Hessian restricted to that layer. Here, we extend these methods to enable them to be applied to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), by analyzing the Kronecker-factored structure of the Hessian matrix of convolutional layers. Several improvements to the methods in Goldfarb et al. (2020) are also proposed that can be applied to both MLPs and CNNs. These new methods have memory requirements comparable to first-order methods and much less per-iteration time complexity than those in Goldfarb et al. (2020). Moreover, convergence results are proved for a variant under relatively mild conditions. Finally, we compared the performance of our new methods against several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on MLP autoencoder and CNN problems, and found that they outperformed the first-order SOTA methods and performed comparably to the second-order SOTA methods.

(0 min) Adversarial examples are inputs for machine learning models that have been designed by attackers to cause the model to make mistakes. In this paper, we demonstrate that adversarial examples can also be utilized for good to improve the performance of imbalanced learning. We provide a new perspective on how to deal with imbalanced data: adjust the biased decision boundary by training with Guiding Adversarial Examples (GAEs). Our method can effectively increase the accuracy of minority classes while sacrificing little accuracy on majority classes. We empirically show, on several benchmark datasets, our proposed method is comparable to the state-of-the-art method. To our best knowledge, we are the first to deal with imbalanced learning with adversarial examples.

(0 min) We present an adaptive stochastic variance reduced method with an implicit approach for adaptivity. As a variant of SARAH, our method employs the stochastic recursive gradient yet adjusts step-size based on local geometry. We provide convergence guarantees for finite-sum minimization problems and show a faster convergence than SARAH can be achieved if local geometry permits. Furthermore, we propose a practical, fully adaptive variant, which does not require any knowledge of local geometry and any effort of tuning the hyper-parameters. This algorithm implicitly computes step-size and efficiently estimates local Lipschitz smoothness of stochastic functions. The numerical experiments demonstrate the algorithm's strong performance compared to its classical counterparts and other state-of-the-art first-order methods.

(0 min) This paper studies Imitation Learning from Observations alone (ILFO) where the learner is presented with expert demonstrations that consist only of states visited by an expert (without access to actions taken by the expert). We present a provably efficient model-based framework MobILE to solve the ILFO problem. MobILE involves carefully trading off strategic exploration against imitation - this is achieved by integrating the idea of optimism in the face of uncertainty into the distribution matching imitation learning (IL) framework. We provide a unified analysis for MobILE, and demonstrate that MobILE enjoys strong performance guarantees for classes of MDP dynamics that satisfy certain well studied notions of structural complexity. We also show that the ILFO problem is strictly harder than the standard IL problem by presenting an exponential sample complexity separation between IL and ILFO. We complement these theoretical results with experimental simulations on benchmark OpenAI Gym tasks that indicate the efficacy of MobILE. Code for implementing the MobILE framework is available at https://github.com/rahulkidambi/MobILE-NeurIPS2021.

(0 min) In this paper, the problem of training federated learning (FL) algorithms over a realistic wireless network is studied. In particular, in the considered model, wireless users execute an FL algorithm while training their local FL models using their own data and transmitting the trained local FL models to a base station (BS) that will generate a global FL model and send it back to the users. Since all training parameters are transmitted over wireless links, the quality of the training will be affected by wireless factors such as packet errors and the availability of wireless resources. Meanwhile, due to the limited wireless bandwidth, the BS must select an appropriate subset of users to execute the FL algorithm so as to build a global FL model accurately. This joint learning, wireless resource allocation, and user selection problem is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize an FL loss function that captures the performance of the FL algorithm. To address this problem, a closed-form expression for the expected convergence rate of the FL algorithm is first derived to quantify the impact of wireless factors on FL. Then, based on the expected convergence rate of the FL algorithm, the optimal transmit power for each user is derived, under a given user selection and uplink resource block (RB) allocation scheme. Finally, the user selection and uplink RB allocation is optimized so as to minimize the FL loss function. Simulation results show that the proposed joint federated learning and communication framework can reduce the FL loss function value by up to 10% and 16%, respectively, compared to: 1) An optimal user selection algorithm with random resource allocation and 2) a standard FL algorithm with random user selection and resource allocation.

(0 min) Today, more than 12 million people over the age of 40 suffer from ocular diseases. Most commonly, older patients are susceptible to age related macular degeneration, an eye disease that causes blurring of the central vision due to the deterioration of the retina. The former can only be detected through complex and expensive imaging software, markedly a visual field test; this leaves a significant population with untreated eye disease and holds them at risk for complete vision loss. The use of machine learning algorithms has been proposed for treating eye disease. However, the development of these models is limited by a lack of understanding regarding appropriate model and training parameters to maximize model performance. In our study, we address these points by generating 6 models, each with a learning rate of 1 * 10^n where n is 0, -1, -2, ... -6, and calculated a f1 score for each of the models. Our analysis shows that sample imbalance is a key challenge in training of machine learning models and can result in deceptive improvements in training cost which does not translate to true improvements in model predictive performance. Considering the wide ranging impact of the disease and its adverse effects, we developed a machine learning algorithm to treat the same. We trained our model on varying eye disease datasets consisting of over 5000 patients, and the pictures of their infected eyes. In the future, we hope this model is used extensively, especially in areas that are under-resourced, to better diagnose eye disease and improve well being for humanity.

(0 min) As the computational requirements for machine learning systems and the size and complexity of machine learning frameworks increases, essential framework innovation has become challenging. While computational needs have driven recent compiler, networking, and hardware advancements, utilization of those advancements by machine learning tools is occurring at a slower pace. This is in part due to the difficulties involved in prototyping new computational paradigms with existing frameworks. Large frameworks prioritize machine learning researchers and practitioners as end users and pay comparatively little attention to systems researchers who can push frameworks forward -- we argue that both are equally important stakeholders. We introduce Flashlight, an open-source library built to spur innovation in machine learning tools and systems by prioritizing open, modular, customizable internals and state-of-the-art, research-ready models and training setups across a variety of domains. Flashlight allows systems researchers to rapidly prototype and experiment with novel ideas in machine learning computation and has low overhead, competing with and often outperforming other popular machine learning frameworks. We see Flashlight as a tool enabling research that can benefit widely used libraries downstream and bring machine learning and systems researchers closer together.

(0 min) Nash equilibrium (NE) is one of the most important solution concepts in game theory and has broad applications in machine learning research. While tremendous empirical success has been reported on learning approximate NE, whether NE is Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learnable has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we make the first effort to study the PAC learnability of NE in normal-form games. We prove that NE is agnostic PAC learnable if the hypothesis class for Nash predictors has bounded covering numbers. Theoretically, we derive such a result by constructing a self-supervised PAC learning framework based on a commonly-used objective for Nash approximation. Empirically, we provide numerical evidence showing that a Nash predictor trained under our PAC learning framework, even with the most straightforward neural architecture, can efficiently learn the NE for games sampled from the same unknown distribution. Our results justify the feasibility of approximating NE through purely data-driven approaches, which benefits both game theorists and machine learning practitioners.

(0 min) Explaining predictions made by machine learning models is important and have attracted an increased interest. The Shapley value from cooperative game theory has been proposed as a prime approach to compute feature importances towards predictions, especially for images, text, tabular data, and recently graph neural networks (GNNs) on graphs. In this work, we revisit the appropriateness of the Shapley value for graph explanation, where the task is to identify the most important subgraph and constituent nodes for graph-level predictions. We purport that the Shapley value is a no-ideal choice for graph data because it is by definition not structure-aware. We propose a Graph Structure-aware eXplanation (GStarX) method to leverage the critical graph structure information to improve the explanation. Specifically, we propose a scoring function based on a new structure-aware value from the cooperative game theory called the HN value. When used to score node importance, the HN value utilizes graph structures to attribute cooperation surplus between neighbor nodes, resembling message passing in GNNs, so that node importance scores reflect not only the node feature importance, but also the structural roles. We demonstrate that GstarX produces qualitatively more intuitive explanations, and quantitatively improves over strong baselines on chemical graph property prediction and text graph sentiment classification.

(0 min) With the recent advance of deep learning, neural networks have been extensively used for the task of molecular generation. Many deep generators extract atomic relations from molecular graphs and ignore hierarchical information at both atom and molecule levels. In order to extract such hierarchical information, we propose a novel hyperbolic generative model. Our model contains three parts: first, a fully hyperbolic junction-tree encoder-decoder that embeds the hierarchical information of the molecules in the latent hyperbolic space; second, a latent generative adversarial network for generating the latent embeddings; third, a molecular generator that inherits the decoders from the first part and the latent generator from the second part. We evaluate our model on the ZINC dataset using the MOSES benchmarking platform and achieve competitive results, especially in metrics about structural similarity.

(0 min) Foundational work on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis has suggested an exciting corollary: winning tickets found in the context of one task can be transferred to similar tasks, possibly even across different architectures. This has become of broad interest, but methods to study this universality are lacking. We make use of renormalization group theory, a powerful tool from theoretical physics, to address this need. We find that iterative magnitude pruning, the principal algorithm used for discovering winning tickets, is a renormalization group scheme, and can be viewed as inducing a flow in parameter space. We demonstrate that ResNet-50 models with transferable winning tickets have flows with common properties, as would be expected from the theory. Similar observations are made for BERT models, with evidence that their flows are near fixed points. Additionally, we leverage our framework to study winning tickets transferred across ResNet architectures, observing that smaller models have flows with more uniform properties than larger models, complicating transfer between them.

(0 min) Node clustering is a powerful tool in the analysis of networks. We introduce a graph neural network framework to obtain node embeddings for directed networks in a self-supervised manner, including a novel probabilistic imbalance loss, which can be used for network clustering. Here, we propose directed flow imbalance measures, which are tightly related to directionality, to reveal clusters in the network even when there is no density difference between clusters. In contrast to standard approaches in the literature, in this paper, directionality is not treated as a nuisance, but rather contains the main signal. DIGRAC optimizes directed flow imbalance for clustering without requiring label supervision, unlike existing GNN methods, and can naturally incorporate node features, unlike existing spectral methods. Experimental results on synthetic data, in the form of directed stochastic block models, and real-world data at different scales, demonstrate that our method, based on flow imbalance, attains state-of-the-art results on directed graph clustering when compared against 10 methods from the literature, for a wide range of noise and sparsity levels and graph structures and topologies, and even outperforms supervised methods.

(0 min) We identify fragile and robust neurons of deep learning architectures using nodal dropouts of the first convolutional layer. Using an adversarial targeting algorithm, we correlate these neurons with the distribution of adversarial attacks on the network. Adversarial robustness of neural networks has gained significant attention in recent times and highlights intrinsic weaknesses of deep learning networks against carefully constructed distortion applied to input images. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art image classification models trained on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets against the fast gradient sign method attack, a simple yet effective method of deceiving neural networks. Our method identifies the specific neurons of a network that are most affected by the adversarial attack being applied. We, therefore, propose to make fragile neurons more robust against these attacks by compressing features within robust neurons and amplifying the fragile neurons proportionally.

(0 min) In decentralized settings, collaborations between different organizations, such as financial institutions, medical centers, and retail markets, are crucial to providing improved service and performance. However, the underlying organizations may have little interest in sharing their private data, proprietary models, and objective functions. These privacy requirements have created new challenges for organizational collaboration. In this work, we propose Gradient Assisted Learning (GAL), a new method for multiple organizations to assist each other in supervised learning tasks without sharing data, models, and objective functions. In this framework, all participants collaboratively optimize the aggregate of local loss functions, and each participant autonomously builds its own model by iteratively fitting the gradients of the objective function. Experimental studies demonstrate that Gradient Assisted Learning can achieve performance close to centralized learning when all data, models, and objective functions are fully disclosed.

(0 min) Graph Attention Networks (GATs) are one of the most popular GNN architectures and are considered as the state-of-the-art architecture for representation learning with graphs. In GAT, every node attends to its neighbors given its own representation as the query. However, in this paper we show that GAT computes a very limited kind of attention: the ranking of the attention scores is unconditioned on the query node. We formally define this restricted kind of attention as static attention and distinguish it from a strictly more expressive dynamic attention. Because GATs use a static attention mechanism, there are simple graph problems that GAT cannot express: in a controlled problem, we show that static attention hinders GAT from even fitting the training data. To remove this limitation, we introduce a simple fix by modifying the order of operations and propose GATv2: a dynamic graph attention variant that is strictly more expressive than GAT. We perform an extensive evaluation and show that GATv2 outperforms GAT across 11 OGB and other benchmarks while we match their parametric costs. Our code is available at https://github.com/tech-srl/how_attentive_are_gats . GATv2 is available as part of the PyTorch Geometric library, the Deep Graph Library, and the TensorFlow GNN library.

(0 min) In recent years, research on near-term quantum machine learning has explored how classical machine learning algorithms endowed with access to quantum kernels (similarity measures) can outperform their purely classical counterparts. Although theoretical work has shown provable advantage on synthetic data sets, no work done to date has studied empirically whether quantum advantage is attainable and with what kind of data set. In this paper, we report the first systematic investigation of empirical quantum advantage (EQA) in healthcare and life sciences and propose an end-to-end framework to study EQA. We selected electronic health records (EHRs) data subsets and created a configuration space of 5-20 features and 200-300 training samples. For each configuration coordinate, we trained classical support vector machine (SVM) models based on radial basis function (RBF) kernels and quantum models with custom kernels using an IBM quantum computer, making this one of the largest quantum machine learning experiments to date. We empirically identified regimes where quantum kernels could provide advantage on a particular data set and introduced a terrain ruggedness index, a metric to help quantitatively estimate how the accuracy of a given model will perform as a function of the number of features and sample size. The generalizable framework introduced here represents a key step towards a priori identification of data sets where quantum advantage could exist.

(0 min) We propose FiberNet, a method to estimate in-vivo the cardiac fiber architecture of the human atria from multiple catheter recordings of the electrical activation. Cardiac fibers play a central rolein the electro-mechanical function of the heart, yet they aredifficult to determine in-vivo, and hence rarely truly patient-specificin existing cardiac models.FiberNet learns the fibers arrangement by solvingan inverse problem with physics-informed neural networks. The inverse problem amounts to identifyingthe conduction velocity tensor of a cardiac propagation modelfrom a set of sparse activation maps. The use of multiple mapsenables the simultaneous identification of all the componentsof the conduction velocity tensor, including the local fiber angle.We extensively test FiberNet on synthetic 2-D and 3-D examples, diffusion tensor fibers, and a patient-specific case. We show that 3 maps are sufficient to accurately capture the fibers, also in thepresence of noise. With fewer maps, the role of regularization becomesprominent. Moreover, we show that the fitted model can robustlyreproduce unseen activation maps. We envision that FiberNet will help the creation of patient-specific models for personalized medicine.The full code is available at this http URL

(0 min) Humans process visual information with varying resolution (foveated visual system) and explore images by orienting through eye movements the high-resolution fovea to points of interest. The Bayesian ideal searcher (IS) that employs complete knowledge of task-relevant information optimizes eye movement strategy and achieves the optimal search performance. The IS can be employed as an important tool to evaluate the optimality of human eye movements, and potentially provide guidance to improve human observer visual search strategies. Najemnik and Geisler (2005) derived an IS for backgrounds of spatial 1/f noise. The corresponding template responses follow Gaussian distributions and the optimal search strategy can be analytically determined. However, the computation of the IS can be intractable when considering more realistic and complex backgrounds such as medical images. Modern reinforcement learning methods, successfully applied to obtain optimal policy for a variety of tasks, do not require complete knowledge of the background generating functions and can be potentially applied to anatomical backgrounds. An important first step is to validate the optimality of the reinforcement learning method. In this study, we investigate the ability of a reinforcement learning method that employs Q-network to approximate the IS. We demonstrate that the search strategy corresponding to the Q-network is consistent with the IS search strategy. The findings show the potential of the reinforcement learning with Q-network approach to estimate optimal eye movement planning with real anatomical backgrounds.

(0 min) In the past decade, deep active learning (DAL) has heavily focused upon classification problems, or problems that have some 'valid' data manifolds, such as natural languages or images. As a result, existing DAL methods are not applicable to a wide variety of important problems -- such as many scientific computing problems -- that involve regression on relatively unstructured input spaces. In this work we propose the first DAL query-synthesis approach for regression problems. We frame query synthesis as an inverse problem and use the recently-proposed neural-adjoint (NA) solver to efficiently find points in the continuous input domain that optimize the query-by-committee (QBC) criterion. Crucially, the resulting NA-QBC approach removes the one sensitive hyperparameter of the classical QBC active learning approach - the "pool size"- making NA-QBC effectively hyperparameter free. This is significant because DAL methods can be detrimental, even compared to random sampling, if the wrong hyperparameters are chosen. We evaluate Random, QBC and NA-QBC sampling strategies on four regression problems, including two contemporary scientific computing problems. We find that NA-QBC achieves better average performance than random sampling on every benchmark problem, while QBC can be detrimental if the wrong hyperparameters are chosen.

(0 min) As predictive models are deployed into the real world, they must increasingly contend with strategic behavior. A growing body of work on strategic classification treats this problem as a Stackelberg game: the decision-maker "leads" in the game by deploying a model, and the strategic agents "follow" by playing their best response to the deployed model. Importantly, in this framing, the burden of learning is placed solely on the decision-maker, while the agents' best responses are implicitly treated as instantaneous. In this work, we argue that the order of play in strategic classification is fundamentally determined by the relative frequencies at which the decision-maker and the agents adapt to each other's actions. In particular, by generalizing the standard model to allow both players to learn over time, we show that a decision-maker that makes updates faster than the agents can reverse the order of play, meaning that the agents lead and the decision-maker follows. We observe in standard learning settings that such a role reversal can be desirable for both the decision-maker and the strategic agents. Finally, we show that a decision-maker with the freedom to choose their update frequency can induce learning dynamics that converge to Stackelberg equilibria with either order of play.

(0 min) This paper explores the bottleneck of feature representations of deep neural networks (DNNs), from the perspective of the complexity of interactions between input variables encoded in DNNs. To this end, we focus on the multi-order interaction between input variables, where the order represents the complexity of interactions. We discover that a DNN is more likely to encode both too simple interactions and too complex interactions, but usually fails to learn interactions of intermediate complexity. Such a phenomenon is widely shared by different DNNs for different tasks. This phenomenon indicates a cognition gap between DNNs and human beings, and we call it a representation bottleneck. We theoretically prove the underlying reason for the representation bottleneck. Furthermore, we propose a loss to encourage/penalize the learning of interactions of specific complexities, and analyze the representation capacities of interactions of different complexities.

(0 min) In this note, we describe a battery failure detection pipeline backed up by deep learning models. We first introduce a large-scale Electric vehicle (EV) battery dataset including cleaned battery-charging data from hundreds of vehicles. We then formulate battery failure detection as an outlier detection problem, and propose a new algorithm named Dynamic-VAE based on dynamic system and variational autoencoders. We validate the performance of our proposed algorithm against several baselines on our released dataset and demonstrated the effectiveness of Dynamic-VAE.

(0 min) In federated learning (FL), model aggregation has been widely adopted for data privacy. In recent years, assigning different weights to local models has been used to alleviate the FL performance degradation caused by differences between local datasets. However, when various defects make the FL process unreliable, most existing FL approaches expose weak robustness. In this paper, we propose the DEfect-AwaRe federated soft actor-critic (DearFSAC) to dynamically assign weights to local models to improve the robustness of FL. The deep reinforcement learning algorithm soft actor-critic is adopted for near-optimal performance and stable convergence. Besides, an auto-encoder is trained to output low-dimensional embedding vectors that are further utilized to evaluate model quality. In the experiments, DearFSAC outperforms three existing approaches on four datasets for both independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID settings under defective scenarios.

(0 min) We propose a new class of random feature methods for linearizing softmax and Gaussian kernels called hybrid random features (HRFs) that automatically adapt the quality of kernel estimation to provide most accurate approximation in the defined regions of interest. Special instantiations of HRFs lead to well-known methods such as trigonometric (Rahimi and Recht, 2007) or (recently introduced in the context of linear-attention Transformers) positive random features (Choromanski et al., 2021). By generalizing Bochner's Theorem for softmax/Gaussian kernels and leveraging random features for compositional kernels, the HRF-mechanism provides strong theoretical guarantees - unbiased approximation and strictly smaller worst-case relative errors than its counterparts. We conduct exhaustive empirical evaluation of HRF ranging from pointwise kernel estimation experiments, through tests on data admitting clustering structure to benchmarking implicit-attention Transformers (also for downstream Robotics applications), demonstrating its quality in a wide spectrum of machine learning problems.

(0 min) Federated Learning (FL) allows training machine learning models by using the computation and private data resources of many distributed clients such as smartphones and IoT devices. Most existing works on FL assume the clients have ground-truth labels. However, in many practical scenarios, clients do not have task-specific labels, e.g., due to a lack of expertise. This work considers a server that hosts a labeled dataset and wishes to leverage clients with unlabeled data for supervised learning. We propose a new FL framework referred to as SemiFL to address Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (SSFL). In SemiFL, clients have completely unlabeled data, while the server has a small amount of labeled data. SemiFL is communication efficient since it allows to train client-side unsupervised data for multiple local epochs. We demonstrate several strategies in SemiFL to enhance efficiency and prediction, and develop intuitions of why they work. In particular, we provide a theoretical analysis of the use of strong data augmentation for semi-supervised learning, which can be interesting in its own right. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that SemiFL can significantly improve the performance of a labeled server with unlabeled clients. Moreover, SemiFL can outperform many existing SSFL methods, and perform competitively with the state-of-the-art FL and centralized SSL results. For instance, in the standard communication efficient scenarios, SemiFL gives 93% accuracy on the CIFAR10 dataset with only 4000 labeled samples at the server. Such accuracy is 2% away from the result trained from 50000 fully labeled data, and improves 30% upon existing SSFL methods.

(0 min) The paper considers independent reinforcement learning (IRL) for multi-agent decision-making process in the paradigm of federated learning (FL). We show that FL can clearly improve the policy performance of IRL in terms of training efficiency and stability. However, since the policy parameters are trained locally and aggregated iteratively through a central server in FL, frequent information exchange incurs a large amount of communication overheads. To reach a good balance between improving the model's convergence performance and reducing the required communication and computation overheads, this paper proposes a system utility function and develops a consensus-based optimization scheme on top of the periodic averaging method, which introduces the consensus algorithm into FL for the exchange of a model's local gradients. This paper also provides novel convergence guarantees for the developed method, and demonstrates its superior effectiveness and efficiency in improving the system utility value through theoretical analyses and numerical simulation results.

(0 min) We consider a model of two competing microswimming agents engaged in a pursue-evasion task within a low-Reynolds-number environment. Agents can only perform simple manoeuvres and sense hydrodynamic disturbances, which provide ambiguous (partial) information about the opponent's position and motion. We frame the problem as a zero-sum game: the pursuer has to capture the evader in the shortest time, while the evader aims at deferring capture as long as possible. We show that the agents, trained via Adversarial Reinforcement Learning, are able to overcome partial-observability by discovering increasingly complex sequences of moves and countermoves that outperform known heuristic strategies and exploit the hydrodynamic environment.

(0 min) We present the Local Self-Balancing sampler (LSB), a local Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling in purely discrete domains, which is able to autonomously adapt to the target distribution and to reduce the number of target evaluations required to converge. LSB is based on (i) a parametrization of locally balanced proposals, (ii) an objective function based on mutual information and (iii) a self-balancing learning procedure, which minimises the proposed objective to update the proposal parameters. Experiments on energy-based models and Bayesian networks show that LSB converges using a smaller number of queries to the oracle distribution compared to recent local MCMC samplers.

(0 min) Ride-hailing is rapidly changing urban and personal transportation. Ride sharing or pooling is important to mitigate negative externalities of ride-hailing such as increased congestion and environmental impacts. However, there lacks empirical evidence on what affect trip-level sharing behavior in ride-hailing. Using a novel dataset from all ride-hailing trips in Chicago in 2019, we show that the willingness of riders to request a shared ride has monotonically decreased from 27.0% to 12.8% throughout the year, while the trip volume and mileage have remained statistically unchanged. We find that the decline in sharing preference is due to an increased per-mile costs of shared trips and shifting shorter trips to solo. Using ensemble machine learning models, we find that the travel impedance variables (trip cost, distance, and duration) collectively contribute to 95% and 91% of the predictive power in determining whether a trip is requested to share and whether it is successfully shared, respectively. Spatial and temporal attributes, sociodemographic, built environment, and transit supply variables do not entail predictive power at the trip level in presence of these travel impedance variables. This implies that pricing signals are most effective to encourage riders to share their rides. Our findings shed light on sharing behavior in ride-hailing trips and can help devise strategies that increase shared ride-hailing, especially as the demand recovers from pandemic.

(0 min) Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) undergoes complicated multiplicative noise for the mean-square loss. We use this property of SGD noise to derive a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with simpler additive noise by performing a random time change. Using this formalism, we show that the log loss barrier $\Delta\log L=\log[L(\theta^s)/L(\theta^*)]$ between a local minimum $\theta^*$ and a saddle $\theta^s$ determines the escape rate of SGD from the local minimum, contrary to the previous results borrowing from physics that the linear loss barrier $\Delta L=L(\theta^s)-L(\theta^*)$ decides the escape rate. Our escape-rate formula strongly depends on the typical magnitude $h^*$ and the number $n$ of the outlier eigenvalues of the Hessian. This result explains an empirical fact that SGD prefers flat minima with low effective dimensions, giving an insight into implicit biases of SGD.

(0 min) Black-box machine learning learning methods are now routinely used in high-risk settings, like medical diagnostics, which demand uncertainty quantification to avoid consequential model failures. Distribution-free uncertainty quantification (distribution-free UQ) is a user-friendly paradigm for creating statistically rigorous confidence intervals/sets for such predictions. Critically, the intervals/sets are valid without distributional assumptions or model assumptions, possessing explicit guarantees even with finitely many datapoints. Moreover, they adapt to the difficulty of the input; when the input example is difficult, the uncertainty intervals/sets are large, signaling that the model might be wrong. Without much work and without retraining, one can use distribution-free methods on any underlying algorithm, such as a neural network, to produce confidence sets guaranteed to contain the ground truth with a user-specified probability, such as 90%. Indeed, the methods are easy-to-understand and general, applying to many modern prediction problems arising in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, deep reinforcement learning, and so on. This hands-on introduction is aimed at a reader interested in the practical implementation of distribution-free UQ who is not necessarily a statistician. We lead the reader through the practical theory and applications of distribution-free UQ, beginning with conformal prediction and culminating with distribution-free control of any risk, such as the false-discovery rate, false positive rate of out-of-distribution detection, and so on. We will include many explanatory illustrations, examples, and code samples in Python, with PyTorch syntax. The goal is to provide the reader a working understanding of distribution-free UQ, allowing them to put confidence intervals on their algorithms, with one self-contained document.

(0 min) In this paper, we propose a Neural Architecture Search strategy based on self supervision and semi-supervised learning for the task of semantic segmentation. Our approach builds an optimized neural network (NN) model for this task by jointly solving a jigsaw pretext task discovered with self-supervised learning over unlabeled training data, and, exploiting the structure of the unlabeled data with semi-supervised learning. The search of the architecture of the NN model is performed by dynamic routing using a gradient descent algorithm. Experiments on the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets demonstrate that the discovered neural network is more efficient than a state-of-the-art hand-crafted NN model with four times less floating operations.

(0 min) In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowl-edge, the first comprehensive approach for in-corporating various masking mechanisms intoTransformers architectures in a scalable way. Weshow that recent results on linear causal attention (Choromanski et al., 2021) and log-linear RPE-attention (Luo et al., 2021) are special cases of thisgeneral mechanism. However by casting the prob-lem as a topological (graph-based) modulation ofunmasked attention, we obtain several results un-known before, including efficientd-dimensionalRPE-masking and graph-kernel masking. Weleverage many mathematical techniques rangingfrom spectral analysis through dynamic program-ming and random walks to new algorithms forsolving Markov processes on graphs. We providea corresponding empirical evaluation.

(0 min) This paper studies offline Imitation Learning (IL) where an agent learns to imitate an expert demonstrator without additional online environment interactions. Instead, the learner is presented with a static offline dataset of state-action-next state transition triples from a potentially less proficient behavior policy. We introduce Model-based IL from Offline data (MILO): an algorithmic framework that utilizes the static dataset to solve the offline IL problem efficiently both in theory and in practice. In theory, even if the behavior policy is highly sub-optimal compared to the expert, we show that as long as the data from the behavior policy provides sufficient coverage on the expert state-action traces (and with no necessity for a global coverage over the entire state-action space), MILO can provably combat the covariate shift issue in IL. Complementing our theory results, we also demonstrate that a practical implementation of our approach mitigates covariate shift on benchmark MuJoCo continuous control tasks. We demonstrate that with behavior policies whose performances are less than half of that of the expert, MILO still successfully imitates with an extremely low number of expert state-action pairs while traditional offline IL method such as behavior cloning (BC) fails completely. Source code is provided at https://github.com/jdchang1/milo.

(0 min) Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited in their expressive power, struggle with long-range interactions and lack a principled way to model higher-order structures. These problems can be attributed to the strong coupling between the computational graph and the input graph structure. The recently proposed Message Passing Simplicial Networks naturally decouple these elements by performing message passing on the clique complex of the graph. Nevertheless, these models can be severely constrained by the rigid combinatorial structure of Simplicial Complexes (SCs). In this work, we extend recent theoretical results on SCs to regular Cell Complexes, topological objects that flexibly subsume SCs and graphs. We show that this generalisation provides a powerful set of graph "lifting" transformations, each leading to a unique hierarchical message passing procedure. The resulting methods, which we collectively call CW Networks (CWNs), are strictly more powerful than the WL test and not less powerful than the 3-WL test. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of one such scheme, based on rings, when applied to molecular graph problems. The proposed architecture benefits from provably larger expressivity than commonly used GNNs, principled modelling of higher-order signals and from compressing the distances between nodes. We demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of molecular datasets.

(0 min) Second-order optimization methods are among the most widely used optimization approaches for convex optimization problems, and have recently been used to optimize non-convex optimization problems such as deep learning models. The widely used second-order optimization methods such as quasi-Newton methods generally provide curvature information by approximating the Hessian using the secant equation. However, the secant equation becomes insipid in approximating the Newton step owing to its use of the first-order derivatives. In this study, we propose an approximate Newton sketch-based stochastic optimization algorithm for large-scale empirical risk minimization. Specifically, we compute a partial column Hessian of size ($d\times m$) with $m\ll d$ randomly selected variables, then use the \emph{Nystr\"om method} to better approximate the full Hessian matrix. To further reduce the computational complexity per iteration, we directly compute the update step ($\Delta\boldsymbol{w}$) without computing and storing the full Hessian or its inverse. We then integrate our approximated Hessian with stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods. The results of numerical experiments on both convex and non-convex functions show that the proposed approach was able to obtain a better approximation of Newton\textquotesingle s method, exhibiting performance competitive with that of state-of-the-art first-order and stochastic quasi-Newton methods. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical convergence analysis for convex functions.

(0 min) Selective regression allows abstention from prediction if the confidence to make an accurate prediction is not sufficient. In general, by allowing a reject option, one expects the performance of a regression model to increase at the cost of reducing coverage (i.e., by predicting on fewer samples). However, as we show, in some cases, the performance of a minority subgroup can decrease while we reduce the coverage, and thus selective regression can magnify disparities between different sensitive subgroups. Motivated by these disparities, we propose new fairness criteria for selective regression requiring the performance of every subgroup to improve with a decrease in coverage. We prove that if a feature representation satisfies the sufficiency criterion or is calibrated for mean and variance, than the proposed fairness criteria is met. Further, we introduce two approaches to mitigate the performance disparity across subgroups: (a) by regularizing an upper bound of conditional mutual information under a Gaussian assumption and (b) by regularizing a contrastive loss for conditional mean and conditional variance prediction. The effectiveness of these approaches is demonstrated on synthetic and real-world datasets.

(0 min) Origin-Destination Estimation plays an important role in traffic management and traffic simulation in the era of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Nevertheless, previous model-based methods face the under-determined challenge, thus desperate demand for additional assumptions and extra data exists. Deep learning provides an ideal data-based method for connecting inputs and outputs by probabilistic distribution transformation. While relevant researches of applying deep learning into OD estimation are limited due to the challenges lying in data transformation across representation space, especially from dynamic spatial-temporal space to heterogeneous graph in this issue. To address it, we propose Cyclic Graph Attentive Matching Encoder (C-GAME) based on a novel Graph Matcher with double-layer attention mechanism. It realizes effective information exchange and establishes coupling relationship across underlying feature space. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results in experiments, and offers a novel framework for inference task across spaces in prospective employments.

(0 min) Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been thriving and widely deployed in recent years. In general, these systems receive sensor data, compute driving decisions, and output control signals to the vehicles. To smooth out the uncertainties brought by sensor inputs, they usually leverage multi-sensor fusion (MSF) to fuse the sensor inputs and produce a more reliable understanding of the surroundings. However, multi-sensor fusion cannot completely eliminate the uncertainties since it lacks the knowledge about which sensor provides the most accurate data and how to optimally integrate the data provided by the sensors. As a result, critical consequences might happen unexpectedly. In this work, we observed that the popular multi-sensor fusion methods in an industry-grade ADAS can mislead the car control and result in serious safety hazards. Misbehavior can happen regardless of the used fusion methods and the accurate data from at least one sensor. We call such errors as fusion errors and develop a novel evolutionary-based domain-specific search framework, FusED, for the efficient detection of fusion errors. We further apply causality analysis to show that the found fusion errors are indeed caused by the multi-sensor fusion method. We evaluate our framework on two widely used multi-sensor fusion methods in two driving environments. Experimental results show that FusED identifies more than 150 fusion errors. Finally, we provide several suggestions to improve the multi-sensor fusion methods we study.

(0 min) Message-passing algorithms based on the Belief Propagation (BP) equations constitute a well-known distributed computational scheme. It is exact on tree-like graphical models and has also proven to be effective in many problems defined on graphs with loops (from inference to optimization, from signal processing to clustering). The BP-based scheme is fundamentally different from stochastic gradient descent (SGD), on which the current success of deep networks is based. In this paper, we present and adapt to mini-batch training on GPUs a family of BP-based message-passing algorithms with a reinforcement field that biases distributions towards locally entropic solutions. These algorithms are capable of training multi-layer neural networks with discrete weights and activations with performance comparable to SGD-inspired heuristics (BinaryNet) and are naturally well-adapted to continual learning. Furthermore, using these algorithms to estimate the marginals of the weights allows us to make approximate Bayesian predictions that have higher accuracy than point-wise solutions.

(0 min) In deep learning with differential privacy (DP), the neural network achieves the privacy usually at the cost of slower convergence (and thus lower performance) than its non-private counterpart. This work gives the first convergence analysis of the DP deep learning, through the lens of training dynamics and the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Our convergence theory successfully characterizes the effects of two key components in the DP training: the per-sample clipping and the noise addition. Our analysis not only initiates a general principled framework to understand the DP deep learning with any network architecture and loss function, but also motivates a new clipping method -- the global clipping, that significantly improves the convergence, as well as preserves the same DP guarantee and computational efficiency as the existing method, which we term as local clipping. Theoretically speaking, we precisely characterize the effect of per-sample clipping on the NTK matrix and show that the noise level of DP optimizers does not affect the convergence in the gradient flow regime. In particular, the local clipping almost certainly breaks the positive semi-definiteness of NTK, which can be preserved by our global clipping. Consequently, DP gradient descent (GD) with global clipping converge monotonically to zero loss, which is often violated by the existing DP-GD. Notably, our analysis framework easily extends to other optimizers, e.g., DP-Adam. We demonstrate through numerous experiments that DP optimizers equipped with global clipping perform strongly on classification and regression tasks. In addition, our global clipping is surprisingly effective at learning calibrated classifiers, in contrast to the existing DP classifiers which are oftentimes over-confident and unreliable. Implementation-wise, the new clipping can be realized by inserting one line of code into the Pytorch Opacus library.

(0 min) Interpretability techniques aim to provide the rationale behind a model's decision, typically by explaining either an individual prediction (local explanation, e.g. 'why is this patient diagnosed with this condition') or a class of predictions (global explanation, e.g. 'why is this set of patients diagnosed with this condition in general'). While there are many methods focused on either one, few frameworks can provide both local and global explanations in a consistent manner. In this work, we combine two powerful existing techniques, one local (Integrated Gradients, IG) and one global (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors), to provide local and global concept-based explanations. We first sanity check our idea using two synthetic datasets with a known ground truth, and further demonstrate with a benchmark natural image dataset. We test our method with various concepts, target classes, model architectures and IG parameters (e.g. baselines). We show that our method improves global explanations over vanilla TCAV when compared to ground truth, and provides useful local insights. Finally, a user study demonstrates the usefulness of the method compared to no or global explanations only. We hope our work provides a step towards building bridges between many existing local and global methods to get the best of both worlds.

(0 min) This paper addresses the problem of learning an equilibrium efficiently in general-sum Markov games through decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning. Given the fundamental difficulty of calculating a Nash equilibrium (NE), we instead aim at finding a coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE), a solution concept that generalizes NE by allowing possible correlations among the agents' strategies. We propose an algorithm in which each agent independently runs optimistic V-learning (a variant of Q-learning) to efficiently explore the unknown environment, while using a stabilized online mirror descent (OMD) subroutine for policy updates. We show that the agents can find an $\epsilon$-approximate CCE in at most $\widetilde{O}( H^6S A /\epsilon^2)$ episodes, where $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the size of the largest individual action space, and $H$ is the length of an episode. This appears to be the first sample complexity result for learning in generic general-sum Markov games. Our results rely on a novel investigation of an anytime high-probability regret bound for OMD with a dynamic learning rate and weighted regret, which would be of independent interest. One key feature of our algorithm is that it is fully \emph{decentralized}, in the sense that each agent has access to only its local information, and is completely oblivious to the presence of others. This way, our algorithm can readily scale up to an arbitrary number of agents, without suffering from the exponential dependence on the number of agents.

(0 min) Big data has been used widely in many areas including the transportation industry. Using various data sources, traffic states can be well estimated and further predicted for improving the overall operation efficiency. Combined with this trend, this study presents an up-to-date survey of open data and big data tools used for traffic estimation and prediction. Different data types are categorized and the off-the-shelf tools are introduced. To further promote the use of big data for traffic estimation and prediction tasks, challenges and future directions are given for future studies.

(0 min) The prevalence of employing attention mechanisms has brought along concerns on the interpretability of attention distributions. Although it provides insights about how a model is operating, utilizing attention as the explanation of model predictions is still highly dubious. The community is still seeking more interpretable strategies for better identifying local active regions that contribute the most to the final decision. To improve the interpretability of existing attention models, we propose a novel Bilinear Representative Non-Parametric Attention (BR-NPA) strategy that captures the task-relevant human-interpretable information. The target model is first distilled to have higher-resolution intermediate feature maps. From which, representative features are then grouped based on local pairwise feature similarity, to produce finer-grained, more precise attention maps highlighting task-relevant parts of the input. The obtained attention maps are ranked according to the activity level of the compound feature, which provides information regarding the important level of the highlighted regions. The proposed model can be easily adapted in a wide variety of modern deep models, where classification is involved. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments showcase more comprehensive and accurate visual explanations compared to state-of-the-art attention models and visualizations methods across multiple tasks including fine-grained image classification, few-shot classification, and person re-identification, without compromising the classification accuracy. The proposed visualization model sheds imperative light on how neural networks `pay their attention' differently in different tasks.

(0 min) Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) allow us to understand the effect heterogeneity across a large population of individuals. However, typical CATE learners assume all confounding variables are measured in order for the CATE to be identifiable. This requirement can be satisfied by collecting many variables, at the expense of increased sample complexity for estimating CATEs. To combat this, we propose an energy-based model (EBM) that learns a low-dimensional representation of the variables by employing a noise contrastive loss function. With our EBM we introduce a preprocessing step that alleviates the dimensionality curse for any existing learner developed for estimating CATEs. We prove that our EBM keeps the representations partially identifiable up to some universal constant, as well as having universal approximation capability. These properties enable the representations to converge and keep the CATE estimates consistent. Experiments demonstrate the convergence of the representations, as well as show that estimating CATEs on our representations performs better than on the variables or the representations obtained through other dimensionality reduction methods.

(0 min) The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has become a major global threat to human health and well-being. Thus, the development of computer-aided detection (CAD) systems that are capable to accurately distinguish COVID-19 from other diseases using chest computed tomography (CT) and X-ray data is of immediate priority. Such automatic systems are usually based on traditional machine learning or deep learning methods. Differently from most of existing studies, which used either CT scan or X-ray images in COVID-19-case classification, we present a simple but efficient deep learning feature fusion model, called UncertaintyFuseNet, which is able to classify accurately large datasets of both of these types of images. We argue that the uncertainty of the model's predictions should be taken into account in the learning process, even though most of existing studies have overlooked it. We quantify the prediction uncertainty in our feature fusion model using effective Ensemble MC Dropout (EMCD) technique. A comprehensive simulation study has been conducted to compare the results of our new model to the existing approaches, evaluating the performance of competing models in terms of Precision, Recall, F-Measure, Accuracy and ROC curves. The obtained results prove the efficiency of our model which provided the prediction accuracy of 99.08\% and 96.35\% for the considered CT scan and X-ray datasets, respectively. Moreover, our UncertaintyFuseNet model was generally robust to noise and performed well with previously unseen data. The source code of our implementation is freely available at: https://github.com/moloud1987/UncertaintyFuseNet-for-COVID-19-Classification.

(0 min) In this paper, we propose a neural architecture search framework based on a similarity measure between some baseline tasks and a target task. We first define the notion of the task similarity based on the log-determinant of the Fisher Information matrix. Next, we compute the task similarity from each of the baseline tasks to the target task. By utilizing the relation between a target and a set of learned baseline tasks, the search space of architectures for the target task can be significantly reduced, making the discovery of the best candidates in the set of possible architectures tractable and efficient, in terms of GPU days. This method eliminates the requirement for training the networks from scratch for a given target task as well as introducing the bias in the initialization of the search space from the human domain.

(0 min) Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for two-player zero-sum games that has been empirically shown to find approximate Nash equilibria in large games. Although PSRO is guaranteed to converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium and can handle continuous actions, it may take an exponential number of iterations as the number of information states (infostates) grows. We propose Extensive-Form Double Oracle (XDO), an extensive-form double oracle algorithm for two-player zero-sum games that is guaranteed to converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium linearly in the number of infostates. Unlike PSRO, which mixes best responses at the root of the game, XDO mixes best responses at every infostate. We also introduce Neural XDO (NXDO), where the best response is learned through deep RL. In tabular experiments on Leduc poker, we find that XDO achieves an approximate Nash equilibrium in a number of iterations an order of magnitude smaller than PSRO. Experiments on a modified Leduc poker game and Oshi-Zumo show that tabular XDO achieves a lower exploitability than CFR with the same amount of computation. We also find that NXDO outperforms PSRO and NFSP on a sequential multidimensional continuous-action game. NXDO is the first deep RL method that can find an approximate Nash equilibrium in high-dimensional continuous-action sequential games. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/indylab/nxdo.

(0 min) {We investigate the communications design in a multiagent system (MAS) in which agents cooperate to maximize the averaged sum of discounted one-stage rewards of a collaborative task. Due to the limited communication rate between the agents, each agent should efficiently represent its local observation and communicate an abstract version of the observations to improve the collaborative task performance. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a form of rate-distortion problem which we call task-based information compression (TBIC). We then introduce the state-aggregation for information compression algorithm (SAIC) to solve the formulated TBIC problem. It is shown that SAIC is able to achieve near-optimal performance in terms of the achieved sum of discounted rewards. The proposed algorithm is applied to a rendezvous problem and its performance is compared with several benchmarks. Numerical experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

(0 min) We present ReCo, a contrastive learning framework designed at a regional level to assist learning in semantic segmentation. ReCo performs semi-supervised or supervised pixel-level contrastive learning on a sparse set of hard negative pixels, with minimal additional memory footprint. ReCo is easy to implement, being built on top of off-the-shelf segmentation networks, and consistently improves performance in both semi-supervised and supervised semantic segmentation methods, achieving smoother segmentation boundaries and faster convergence. The strongest effect is in semi-supervised learning with very few labels. With ReCo, we achieve high-quality semantic segmentation models, requiring only 5 examples of each semantic class. Code is available at https://github.com/lorenmt/reco.

(0 min) Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models, variational inference (VI) is often the preferable option. Unfortunately, VI makes strong assumptions on both the factorization and functional form of the posterior. In this work, we propose a new non-parametric variational approximation that makes no assumptions about the approximate posterior's functional form and allows practitioners to specify the exact dependencies the algorithm should respect or break. The approach relies on a new Langevin-type algorithm that operates on a modified energy function, where parts of the latent variables are averaged over samples from earlier iterations of the Markov chain. This way, statistical dependencies can be broken in a controlled way, allowing the chain to mix faster. This scheme can be further modified in a "dropout" manner, leading to even more scalability. We test our scheme for ResNet-20 on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and FMNIST. In all cases, we find improvements in convergence speed and/or final accuracy compared to SG-MCMC and VI.

(0 min) Speech provides a natural way for human-computer interaction. In particular, speech synthesis systems are popular in different applications, such as personal assistants, GPS applications, screen readers and accessibility tools. However, not all languages are on the same level when in terms of resources and systems for speech synthesis. This work consists of creating publicly available resources for Brazilian Portuguese in the form of a novel dataset along with deep learning models for end-to-end speech synthesis. Such dataset has 10.5 hours from a single speaker, from which a Tacotron 2 model with the RTISI-LA vocoder presented the best performance, achieving a 4.03 MOS value. The obtained results are comparable to related works covering English language and the state-of-the-art in Portuguese.

(0 min) We consider the problem of learning stabilizer states with noise in the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) framework of Aaronson (2007) for learning quantum states. In the noiseless setting, an algorithm for this problem was recently given by Rocchetto (2018), but the noisy case was left open. Motivated by approaches to noise tolerance from classical learning theory, we introduce the Statistical Query (SQ) model for PAC-learning quantum states, and prove that algorithms in this model are indeed resilient to common forms of noise, including classification and depolarizing noise. We prove an exponential lower bound on learning stabilizer states in the SQ model. Even outside the SQ model, we prove that learning stabilizer states with noise is in general as hard as Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) using classical examples. Our results position the problem of learning stabilizer states as a natural quantum analogue of the classical problem of learning parities: easy in the noiseless setting, but seemingly intractable even with simple forms of noise.

(0 min) In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features only. We present Thresholded Lasso bandit, an algorithm that (i) estimates the vector defining the reward function as well as its sparse support, i.e., significant feature elements, using the Lasso framework with thresholding, and (ii) selects an arm greedily according to this estimate projected on its support. The algorithm does not require prior knowledge of the sparsity index $s_0$ and can be parameter-free. For this simple algorithm, we establish non-asymptotic regret upper bounds scaling as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \sqrt{T} )$ in general, and as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \log T)$ under the so-called margin condition (a probabilistic condition on the separation of the arm rewards). The regret of previous algorithms scales as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \sqrt{T \log (d T)})$ and $\mathcal{O}( \log T \log d)$ in the two settings, respectively. Through numerical experiments, we confirm that our algorithm outperforms existing methods.

(0 min) In partially observable reinforcement learning, offline training gives access to latent information which is not available during online training and/or execution, such as the system state. Asymmetric actor-critic methods exploit such information by training a history-based policy via a state-based critic. However, many asymmetric methods lack theoretical foundation, and are only evaluated on limited domains. We examine the theory of asymmetric actor-critic methods which use state-based critics, and expose fundamental issues which undermine the validity of a common variant, and limit its ability to address partial observability. We propose an unbiased asymmetric actor-critic variant which is able to exploit state information while remaining theoretically sound, maintaining the validity of the policy gradient theorem, and introducing no bias and relatively low variance into the training process. An empirical evaluation performed on domains which exhibit significant partial observability confirms our analysis, demonstrating that unbiased asymmetric actor-critic converges to better policies and/or faster than symmetric and biased asymmetric baselines.

(0 min) For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate individual states or provide binary preferences over trajectories. From such expensive feedback, we aim to learn a model of the reward that allows standard RL algorithms to achieve high expected returns with as few expert queries as possible. To this end, we propose Information Directed Reward Learning (IDRL), which uses a Bayesian model of the reward and selects queries that maximize the information gain about the difference in return between plausibly optimal policies. In contrast to prior active reward learning methods designed for specific types of queries, IDRL naturally accommodates different query types. Moreover, it achieves similar or better performance with significantly fewer queries by shifting the focus from reducing the reward approximation error to improving the policy induced by the reward model. We support our findings with extensive evaluations in multiple environments and with different query types.

(0 min) We extend the definition of the marginal causal effect to the continuous treatment setting and develop a novel characterization of causal bias in the framework of structural causal models. We prove that our derived bias expression is zero if, and only if, the causal effect is identifiable via covariate adjustment. We show that under some restrictions on the structural equations, the causal bias can be estimated efficiently and allows for causal regularization of predictive probabilistic models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for causal bias quantification in various settings where (not) controlling for certain covariates would introduce causal bias.

(0 min) We introduce the first metric for evaluating disentanglement at individual hierarchy levels of a structured latent representation. Applied to object-centric generative models, this offers a systematic, unified approach to evaluating (i) object separation between latent slots (ii) disentanglement of object properties inside individual slots (iii) disentanglement of intrinsic and extrinsic object properties. We theoretically show that for structured representations, our framework gives stronger guarantees of selecting a good model than previous disentanglement metrics. Experimentally, we demonstrate that viewing object compositionality as a disentanglement problem addresses several issues with prior visual metrics of object separation. As a core technical component, we present the first representation probing algorithm handling slot permutation invariance.

(0 min) We consider the problem of minimizing a function over the manifold of orthogonal matrices. The majority of algorithms for this problem compute a direction in the tangent space, and then use a retraction to move in that direction while staying on the manifold. Unfortunately, the numerical computation of retractions on the orthogonal manifold always involves some expensive linear algebra operation, such as matrix inversion, exponential or square-root. These operations quickly become expensive as the dimension of the matrices grows. To bypass this limitation, we propose the landing algorithm which does not use retractions. The algorithm is not constrained to stay on the manifold but its evolution is driven by a potential energy which progressively attracts it towards the manifold. One iteration of the landing algorithm only involves matrix multiplications, which makes it cheap compared to its retraction counterparts. We provide an analysis of the convergence of the algorithm, and demonstrate its promises on large-scale and deep learning problems, where it is faster and less prone to numerical errors than retraction-based methods.

(0 min) Recently it has been shown that Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) based regularization for Optimal Transport (OT) can improve the sample complexity of estimation. However, the metric and other important properties of such MMD-regularized OT formulations are not well-understood. In this work, we not only bridge this gap, but further study novel Integral Probability Metric (IPM) regularized p-Wasserstein style formulations. We present generic settings under which we prove that the proposed OT formulations induce novel metrics over measures. While some of these novel metrics can be interpreted as infimal convolutions of IPMs; interestingly, some others turn out to be IPM-analogues of the so-called generalized Wasserstein metrics and the Gaussian Hellinger-Kantorovich metrics. Finally, we present finite sample based simplified formulations for estimating the squared-MMD regularized metrics as well as the corresponding barycenter. We empirically validate our theoretical findings and show improvements in downstream applications.

(0 min) Even though fine-grained pruning techniques achieve a high compression ratio, conventional sparsity representations (such as CSR) associated with irregular sparsity degrade parallelism significantly. Practical pruning methods, thus, usually lower pruning rates (by structured pruning) to improve parallelism. In this paper, we study fixed-to-fixed (lossless) encoding architecture/algorithm to support fine-grained pruning methods such that sparse neural networks can be stored in a highly regular structure. We first estimate the maximum compression ratio of encoding-based compression using entropy. Then, as an effort to push the compression ratio to the theoretical maximum (by entropy), we propose a sequential fixed-to-fixed encoding scheme. We demonstrate that our proposed compression scheme achieves almost the maximum compression ratio for the Transformer and ResNet-50 pruned by various fine-grained pruning methods.

(0 min) We perform scalable approximate inference in continuous-depth Bayesian neural networks. In this model class, uncertainty about separate weights in each layer gives hidden units that follow a stochastic differential equation. We demonstrate gradient-based stochastic variational inference in this infinite-parameter setting, producing arbitrarily-flexible approximate posteriors. We also derive a novel gradient estimator that approaches zero variance as the approximate posterior over weights approaches the true posterior. This approach brings continuous-depth Bayesian neural nets to a competitive comparison against discrete-depth alternatives, while inheriting the memory-efficient training and tunable precision of Neural ODEs.

(0 min) Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense 'closest' to the full Bayesian posterior. Closeness is typically defined through the selection of an appropriate loss functional such as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this paper, we explore a new formulation of variational inference by exploiting the fact that (most) PDFs are members of a Bayesian Hilbert space under careful definitions of vector addition, scalar multiplication and an inner product. We show that variational inference based on KL divergence then amounts to an iterative projection, in the Euclidean sense, of the Bayesian posterior onto a subspace corresponding to the selected approximation family. We work through the details of this general framework for the specific case of the Gaussian approximation family and show the equivalence to another Gaussian variational inference approach. We furthermore discuss the implications for systems that exhibit sparsity, which is handled naturally in Bayesian space, and give an example of a high-dimensional robotic state estimation problem that can be handled as a result. Finally, we provide some preliminary examples of how the approach could be applied to non-Gaussian inference.

(0 min) Latest insights from biology show that intelligence not only emerges from the connections between neurons but that individual neurons shoulder more computational responsibility than previously anticipated. This perspective should be critical in the context of constantly changing distinct reinforcement learning environments, yet current approaches still primarily employ static activation functions. In this work, we motivate why rationals are suitable for adaptable activation functions and why their inclusion into neural networks is crucial. Inspired by recurrence in residual networks, we derive a condition under which rational units are closed under residual connections and formulate a naturally regularised version: the recurrent-rational. We demonstrate that equipping popular algorithms with (recurrent-)rational activations leads to consistent improvements on Atari games, especially turning simple DQN into a solid approach, competitive to DDQN and Rainbow.

(0 min) It is well known that machine learning methods can be vulnerable to adversarially-chosen perturbations of their inputs. Despite significant progress in the area, foundational open problems remain. In this paper, we address several key questions. We derive exact and approximate Bayes-optimal robust classifiers for the important setting of two- and three-class Gaussian classification problems with arbitrary imbalance, for $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ adversaries. In contrast to classical Bayes-optimal classifiers, determining the optimal decisions here cannot be made pointwise and new theoretical approaches are needed. We develop and leverage new tools, including recent breakthroughs from probability theory on robust isoperimetry, which, to our knowledge, have not yet been used in the area. Our results reveal fundamental tradeoffs between standard and robust accuracy that grow when data is imbalanced. We also show further results, including an analysis of classification calibration for convex losses in certain models, and finite sample rates for the robust risk.

(0 min) One of the most important properties of deep auto-encoders (DAEs) is their capability to extract high level features from row data. Hence, especially recently, the autoencoders are preferred to be used in various classification problems such as image and voice recognition, computer security, medical data analysis, etc. Despite, its popularity and high performance, the training phase of autoencoders is still a challenging task, involving to select best parameters that let the model to approach optimal results. Different training approaches are applied to train sparse autoencoders. Previous studies and preliminary experiments reveal that those approaches may present remarkable results in same problems but also disappointing results can be obtained in other complex problems. Metaheuristic algorithms have emerged over the last two decades and are becoming an essential part of contemporary optimization techniques. Gray wolf optimization (GWO) is one of the current of those algorithms and is applied to train sparse auto-encoders for this study. This model is validated by employing several popular Gene expression databases. Results are compared with previous state-of-the art methods studied with the same data sets and also are compared with other popular metaheuristic algorithms, namely, Genetic Algorithms (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). Results reveal that the performance of the trained model using GWO outperforms on both conventional models and models trained with most popular metaheuristic algorithms.

(0 min) We consider the problem of generating maximally adversarial disturbances for a given controller assuming only blackbox access to it. We propose an online learning approach to this problem that \emph{adaptively} generates disturbances based on control inputs chosen by the controller. The goal of the disturbance generator is to minimize \emph{regret} versus a benchmark disturbance-generating policy class, i.e., to maximize the cost incurred by the controller as well as possible compared to the best possible disturbance generator \emph{in hindsight} (chosen from a benchmark policy class). In the setting where the dynamics are linear and the costs are quadratic, we formulate our problem as an online trust region (OTR) problem with memory and present a new online learning algorithm (\emph{MOTR}) for this problem. We prove that this method competes with the best disturbance generator in hindsight (chosen from a rich class of benchmark policies that includes linear-dynamical disturbance generating policies). We demonstrate our approach on two simulated examples: (i) synthetically generated linear systems, and (ii) generating wind disturbances for the popular PX4 controller in the AirSim simulator. On these examples, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms several baseline approaches, including $H_{\infty}$ disturbance generation and gradient-based methods.

(0 min) Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used in various domains due to their impressive capabilities. These models are typically composed of a large number of 2D convolutional (Conv2D) layers with numerous trainable parameters. To reduce the complexity of a network, compression techniques can be applied. These methods typically rely on the analysis of trained deep learning models. However, in some applications, due to reasons such as particular data or system specifications and licensing restrictions, a pre-trained network may not be available. This would require the user to train a CNN from scratch. In this paper, we aim to find an alternative parameterization to Conv2D filters without relying on a pre-trained convolutional network. During the analysis, we observe that the effective rank of the vectorized Conv2D filters decreases with respect to the increasing depth in the network, which then leads to the implementation of the Depthwise Convolutional Eigen-Filter (DeCEF) layer. Essentially, a DeCEF layer is a low rank version of the Conv2D layer with significantly fewer trainable parameters and floating point operations (FLOPs). The way we define the effective rank is different from the previous work and it is easy to implement in any deep learning frameworks. To evaluate the effectiveness of DeCEF, experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets CIFAR-10 and ImageNet using various network architectures. The results have shown a similar or higher accuracy and robustness using about 2/3 of the original parameters and reducing the number of FLOPs to 2/3 of the base network, which is then compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.

(0 min) Distributed learning has become a hot research topic due to its wide application in clusterbased large-scale learning, federated learning, edge computing and so on. Most traditional distributed learning methods typically assume no failure or attack. However, many unexpected cases, such as communication failure and even malicious attack, may happen in real applications. Hence, Byzantine learning (BL), which refers to distributed learning with failure or attack, has recently attracted much attention. Most existing BL methods are synchronous, which are impractical in some applications due to heterogeneous or offline workers. In these cases, asynchronous BL (ABL) is usually preferred. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called buffered asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (BASGD), for ABL. To the best of our knowledge, BASGD is the first ABL method that can resist non-omniscient attacks without storing any instances on server. Furthermore, we also propose an improved variant of BASGD, called BASGD with momentum (BASGDm), by introducing momentum into BASGD. BASGDm can resist both non-omniscient and omniscient attacks. Compared with those methods which need to store instances on server, BASGD and BASGDm have a wider scope of application. Both BASGD and BASGDm are compatible with various aggregation rules. Moreover, both BASGD and BASGDm are proved to be convergent and be able to resist failure or attack. Empirical results show that our methods significantly outperform existing ABL baselines when there exists failure or attack on workers.

(0 min) Point cloud models with neural network architectures have achieved great success and have been widely used in safety-critical applications, such as Lidar-based recognition systems in autonomous vehicles. However, such models are shown vulnerable against adversarial attacks which aim to apply stealthy semantic transformations such as rotation and tapering to mislead model predictions. In this paper, we propose a transformation-specific smoothing framework TPC, which provides tight and scalable robustness guarantees for point cloud models against semantic transformation attacks. We first categorize common 3D transformations into three categories: additive (e.g., shearing), composable (e.g., rotation), and indirectly composable (e.g., tapering), and we present generic robustness certification strategies for all categories respectively. We then specify unique certification protocols for a range of specific semantic transformations and their compositions. Extensive experiments on several common 3D transformations show that TPC significantly outperforms the state of the art. For example, our framework boosts the certified accuracy against twisting transformation along z-axis (within 20$^\circ$) from 20.3$\%$ to 83.8$\%$.

(0 min) This paper presents the FSOCO dataset, a collaborative dataset for vision-based cone detection systems in Formula Student Driverless competitions. It contains human annotated ground truth labels for both bounding boxes and instance-wise segmentation masks. The data buy-in philosophy of FSOCO asks student teams to contribute to the database first before being granted access ensuring continuous growth. By providing clear labeling guidelines and tools for a sophisticated raw image selection, new annotations are guaranteed to meet the desired quality. The effectiveness of the approach is shown by comparing prediction results of a network trained on FSOCO and its unregulated predecessor. The FSOCO dataset can be found at fsoco-dataset.com.

(0 min) We propose a \emph{collaborative} multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm named variational policy propagation (VPP) to learn a \emph{joint} policy through the interactions over agents. We prove that the joint policy is a Markov Random Field under some mild conditions, which in turn reduces the policy space effectively. We integrate the variational inference as special differentiable layers in policy such that the actions can be efficiently sampled from the Markov Random Field and the overall policy is differentiable. We evaluate our algorithm on several large scale challenging tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.

(0 min) While artificial-intelligence-based methods suffer from lack of transparency, rule-based methods dominate in safety-critical systems. Yet, the latter cannot compete with the first ones in robustness to multiple requirements, for instance, simultaneously addressing safety, comfort, and efficiency. Hence, to benefit from both methods they must be joined in a single system. This paper proposes a decision making and control framework, which profits from advantages of both the rule- and machine-learning-based techniques while compensating for their disadvantages. The proposed method embodies two controllers operating in parallel, called Safety and Learned. A rule-based switching logic selects one of the actions transmitted from both controllers. The Safety controller is prioritized every time, when the Learned one does not meet the safety constraint, and also directly participates in the safe Learned controller training. Decision making and control in autonomous driving is chosen as the system case study, where an autonomous vehicle learns a multi-task policy to safely cross an unprotected intersection. Multiple requirements (i.e., safety, efficiency, and comfort) are set for vehicle operation. A numerical simulation is performed for the proposed framework validation, where its ability to satisfy the requirements and robustness to changing environment is successfully demonstrated.

(0 min) We consider a class of structured fractional minimization problems, in which the numerator part of the objective is the sum of a differentiable convex function and a convex nonsmooth function, while the denominator part is a concave or convex function. This problem is difficult to solve since it is nonconvex. By exploiting the structure of the problem, we propose two Coordinate Descent (CD) methods for solving this problem. One is applied to the original fractional function, the other is based on the associated parametric problem. The proposed methods iteratively solve a one-dimensional subproblem \textit{globally}, and they are guaranteed to converge to coordinate-wise stationary points. In the case of a convex denominator, we prove that the proposed CD methods using sequential nonconvex approximation find stronger stationary points than existing methods. Under suitable conditions, CD methods with an appropriate initialization converge linearly to the optimal point (also the coordinate-wise stationary point). In the case of a concave denominator, we show that the resulting problem is quasi-convex, and any critical point is a global minimum. We prove that the algorithms converge to the global optimal solution with a sublinear convergence rate. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methods to some machine learning and signal processing models. Our experiments on real-world data have shown that our method significantly and consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy.

(0 min) We propose a novel Graph Self-Attention module to enable Transformer models to learn graph representation. We aim to incorporate graph information, on the attention map and hidden representations of Transformer. To this end, we propose context-aware attention which considers the interactions between query, key and graph information. Moreover, we propose graph-embedded value to encode the graph information on the hidden representation. Our extensive experiments and ablation studies validate that our method successfully encodes graph representation on Transformer architecture. Finally, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks of graph representation learning, such as graph classification on images and molecules to graph regression on quantum chemistry.

(0 min) We show that Contrastive Learning (CL) under a family of loss functions (including InfoNCE) has a game-theoretical formulation, where the \emph{max player} finds representation to maximize contrastiveness, and the \emph{min player} puts weights on pairs of samples with similar representation. We show that the max player who does \emph{representation learning} reduces to Principal Component Analysis for deep linear network, and almost all local minima are global, recovering optimal PCA solutions. Experiments show that the formulation yields comparable (or better) performance on CIFAR10 and STL-10 when extending beyond InfoNCE, yielding novel contrastive losses. Furthermore, we extend our theoretical analysis to 2-layer ReLU networks, showing its difference from linear ones, and proving that feature composition is preferred over picking single dominant feature under strong augmentation.

(0 min) Distributed machine learning (DML) over time-varying networks can be an enabler for emerging decentralized ML applications such as autonomous driving and drone fleeting. However, the commonly used weighted arithmetic mean model aggregation function in existing DML systems can result in high model loss, low model accuracy, and slow convergence speed over time-varying networks. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel non-linear class of model aggregation functions to achieve efficient DML over time-varying networks. Instead of taking a linear aggregation of neighboring models as most existing studies do, our mechanism uses a nonlinear aggregation, a weighted power-p mean (WPM) where p is a positive odd integer, as the aggregation function of local models from neighbors. The subsequent optimizing steps are taken using mirror descent defined by a Bregman divergence that maintains convergence to optimality. In this paper, we analyze properties of the WPM and rigorously prove convergence properties of our aggregation mechanism. Additionally, through extensive experiments, we show that when p > 1, our design significantly improves the convergence speed of the model and the scalability of DML under time-varying networks compared with arithmetic mean aggregation functions, with little additional 26computation overhead.

(0 min) Algorithms which minimize the averaged loss have been widely designed for dealing with noisy labels. Intuitively, when there is a finite training sample, penalizing the variance of losses will improve the stability and generalization of the algorithms. Interestingly, we found that the variance should be increased for the problem of learning with noisy labels. Specifically, increasing the variance will boost the memorization effects and reduce the harmfulness of incorrect labels. By exploiting the label noise transition matrix, regularizers can be easily designed to reduce the variance of losses and be plugged in many existing algorithms. Empirically, the proposed method by increasing the variance of losses significantly improves the generalization ability of baselines on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

(0 min) Spiking neural networks (SNNs) that mimic information transmission in the brain can energy-efficiently process spatio-temporal information through discrete and sparse spikes, thereby receiving considerable attention. To improve accuracy and energy efficiency of SNNs, most previous studies have focused solely on training methods, and the effect of architecture has rarely been studied. We investigate the design choices used in the previous studies in terms of the accuracy and number of spikes and figure out that they are not best-suited for SNNs. To further improve the accuracy and reduce the spikes generated by SNNs, we propose a spike-aware neural architecture search framework called AutoSNN. We define a search space consisting of architectures without undesirable design choices. To enable the spike-aware architecture search, we introduce a fitness that considers both the accuracy and number of spikes. AutoSNN successfully searches for SNN architectures that outperform hand-crafted SNNs in accuracy and energy efficiency. We thoroughly demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoSNN on various datasets including neuromorphic datasets.

(0 min) In multiclass classification of multidimensional data, the user wants to build a model of the classes to predict the label of unseen data. The model is trained on the data and tested on unseen data with known labels to evaluate its quality. The results are visualized as a confusion matrix which shows how many data labels have been predicted correctly or confused with other classes. The multidimensional nature of the data prevents the direct visualization of the classes so we design ClassSPLOM to give more perceptual insights about the classification results. It uses the Scatterplot Matrix (SPLOM) metaphor to visualize a Linear Discriminant Analysis projection of the data for each pair of classes and a set of Receiving Operating Curves to evaluate their trustworthiness. We illustrate ClassSPLOM on a use case in Arabic dialects identification.

(0 min) Batch Normalization (BN) is an essential layer for training neural network models in various computer vision tasks. It has been widely used in continual learning scenarios with little discussion, but we find that BN should be carefully applied, particularly for the exemplar memory based class incremental learning (CIL). We first analyze that the empirical mean and variance obtained for normalization in a BN layer become highly biased toward the current task. To tackle its significant problems in training and test phases, we propose Task-Balanced Batch Normalization (TBBN). Given each mini-batch imbalanced between the current and previous tasks, TBBN first reshapes and repeats the batch, calculating near task-balanced mean and variance. Second, we show that when the affine transformation parameters of BN are learned from a reshaped feature map, they become less-biased toward the current task. Based on our extensive CIL experiments with CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-100 datasets, we demonstrate that our TBBN is easily applicable to most of existing exemplar-based CIL algorithms, improving their performance by decreasing the forgetting on the previous tasks.

(0 min) Tensor recovery is an important problem in computer vision and machine learning. It usually uses the convex relaxation of tensor rank and $l_{0}$ norm, i.e., the nuclear norm and $l_{1}$ norm respectively, to solve the problem. It is well known that convex approximations produce biased estimators. In order to overcome this problem, a corresponding non-convex regularizer has been proposed to solve it. Inspired by matrix equivalent Minimax-Concave Penalty (EMCP), we propose and prove theorems of tensor equivalent Minimax-Concave Penalty (TEMCP). The tensor equivalent MCP (TEMCP) as a non-convex regularizer and the equivalent weighted tensor $\gamma$ norm (EWTGN) which can represent the low-rank part are obtained. Both of them can realize weight adaptive. At the same time, we propose two corresponding adaptive models for two classical tensor recovery problems, low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) and tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA), and the optimization algorithm is based on alternating direction multiplier (ADMM). This novel iterative adaptive algorithm can produce more accurate tensor recovery effect. For the tensor completion model, multispectral image (MSI), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and color video (CV) data sets are considered, while for the tensor robust principal component analysis model, hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising under gaussian noise plus salt and pepper noise is considered. The proposed algorithm is superior to the state-of-arts method, and the algorithm is guaranteed to meet the reduction and convergence through experiments.

(0 min) Arabic sentiment analysis has become an important research field in recent years. Initially, work focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the most widely-used form. Since then, work has been carried out on several different dialects, including Egyptian, Levantine and Moroccan. Moreover, a number of datasets have been created to support such work. However, up until now, less work has been carried out on Sudanese Arabic, a dialect which has 32 million speakers. In this paper, two new publicly available datasets are introduced, the 2-Class Sudanese Sentiment Dataset (SudSenti2) and the 3-Class Sudanese Sentiment Dataset (SudSenti3). Furthermore, a CNN architecture, SCM, is proposed, comprising five CNN layers together with a novel pooling layer, MMA, to extract the best features. This SCM+MMA model is applied to SudSenti2 and SudSenti3 with accuracies of 92.75% and 84.39%. Next, the model is compared to other deep learning classifiers and shown to be superior on these new datasets. Finally, the proposed model is applied to the existing Saudi Sentiment Dataset and to the MSA Hotel Arabic Review Dataset with accuracies 85.55% and 90.01%.

(0 min) We study the conjectured relationship between the implicit regularization in neural networks, trained with gradient-based methods, and rank minimization of their weight matrices. Previously, it was proved that for linear networks (of depth 2 and vector-valued outputs), gradient flow (GF) w.r.t. the square loss acts as a rank minimization heuristic. However, understanding to what extent this generalizes to nonlinear networks is an open problem. In this paper, we focus on nonlinear ReLU networks, providing several new positive and negative results. On the negative side, we prove (and demonstrate empirically) that, unlike the linear case, GF on ReLU networks may no longer tend to minimize ranks, in a rather strong sense (even approximately, for "most" datasets of size 2). On the positive side, we reveal that ReLU networks of sufficient depth are provably biased towards low-rank solutions in several reasonable settings.

(0 min) Random partition models are widely used in Bayesian methods for various clustering tasks, such as mixture models, topic models, and community detection problems. While the number of clusters induced by random partition models has been studied extensively, another important model property regarding the balancedness of cluster sizes has been largely neglected. We formulate a framework to define and theoretically study the balancedness of exchangeable random partition models, by analyzing how a model assigns probabilities to partitions with different levels of balancedness. We demonstrate that the "rich-get-richer" characteristic of many existing popular random partition models is an inevitable consequence of two common assumptions: product-form exchangeability and projectivity. We propose a principled way to compare the balancedness of random partition models, which gives a better understanding of what model works better and what doesn't for different applications. We also introduce the "rich-get-poorer" random partition models and illustrate their application to entity resolution tasks.

(0 min) Device-free wireless indoor localization is an essential technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), and fingerprint-based methods are widely used. A common challenge to fingerprint-based methods is data collection and labeling. This paper proposes a few-shot transfer learning system that uses only a small amount of labeled data from the current environment and reuses a large amount of existing labeled data previously collected in other environments, thereby significantly reducing the data collection and labeling cost for localization in each new environment. The core method lies in graph neural network (GNN) based few-shot transfer learning and its modifications. Experimental results conducted on real-world environments show that the proposed system achieves comparable performance to a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, with 40 times fewer labeled data.

(0 min) Although Transformer-based methods have significantly improved state-of-the-art results for long-term series forecasting, they are not only computationally expensive but more importantly, are unable to capture the global view of time series (e.g. overall trend). To address these problems, we propose to combine Transformer with the seasonal-trend decomposition method, in which the decomposition method captures the global profile of time series while Transformers capture more detailed structures. To further enhance the performance of Transformer for long-term prediction, we exploit the fact that most time series tend to have a sparse representation in well-known basis such as Fourier transform, and develop a frequency enhanced Transformer. Besides being more effective, the proposed method, termed as Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer ({\bf FEDformer}), is more efficient than standard Transformer with a linear complexity to the sequence length. Our empirical studies with six benchmark datasets show that compared with state-of-the-art methods, FEDformer can reduce prediction error by $14.8\%$ and $22.6\%$ for multivariate and univariate time series, respectively. the code will be released soon.

(0 min) Random forests are considered one of the best out-of-the-box classification and regression algorithms due to their high level of predictive performance with relatively little tuning. Pairwise proximities can be computed from a trained random forest which measure the similarity between data points relative to the supervised task. Random forest proximities have been used in many applications including the identification of variable importance, data imputation, outlier detection, and data visualization. However, existing definitions of random forest proximities do not accurately reflect the data geometry learned by the random forest. In this paper, we introduce a novel definition of random forest proximities called Random Forest-Geometry- and Accuracy-Preserving proximities (RF-GAP). We prove that the proximity-weighted sum (regression) or majority vote (classification) using RF-GAP exactly match the out-of-bag random forest prediction, thus capturing the data geometry learned by the random forest. We empirically show that this improved geometric representation outperforms traditional random forest proximities in tasks such as data imputation and provides outlier detection and visualization results consistent with the learned data geometry.

(0 min) Learning from repeated play in a fixed two-player zero-sum game is a classic problem in game theory and online learning. We consider a variant of this problem where the game payoff matrix changes over time, possibly in an adversarial manner. We first present three performance measures to guide the algorithmic design for this problem: 1) the well-studied individual regret, 2) an extension of duality gap, and 3) a new measure called dynamic Nash Equilibrium regret, which quantifies the cumulative difference between the player's payoff and the minimax game value. Next, we develop a single parameter-free algorithm that simultaneously enjoys favorable guarantees under all these three performance measures. These guarantees are adaptive to different non-stationarity measures of the payoff matrices and, importantly, recover the best known results when the payoff matrix is fixed. Our algorithm is based on a two-layer structure with a meta-algorithm learning over a group of black-box base-learners satisfying a certain property, along with several novel ingredients specifically designed for the time-varying game setting. Empirical results further validate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

(0 min) Optimizing multiple, non-preferential objectives for mixed-variable, expensive black-box problems is important in many areas of engineering and science. The expensive, noisy black-box nature of these problems makes them ideal candidates for Bayesian optimization (BO). Mixed-variable and multi-objective problems, however, are a challenge due to the BO's underlying smooth Gaussian process surrogate model. Current multi-objective BO algorithms cannot deal with mixed-variable problems. We present MixMOBO, the first mixed variable multi-objective Bayesian optimization framework for such problems. Using a genetic algorithm to sample the surrogate surface, optimal Pareto-fronts for multi-objective, mixed-variable design spaces can be found efficiently while ensuring diverse solutions. The method is sufficiently flexible to incorporate many different kernels and acquisition functions, including those that were developed for mixed-variable or multi-objective problems by other authors. We also present HedgeMO, a modified Hedge strategy that uses a portfolio of acquisition functions in multi-objective problems. We present a new acquisition function SMC. We show that MixMOBO performs well against other mixed-variable algorithms on synthetic problems. We apply MixMOBO to the real-world design of an architected material and show that our optimal design, which was experimentally fabricated and validated, has a normalized strain energy density $10^4$ times greater than existing structures.

(0 min) Contrastive learning aims to extract distinctive features from data by finding an embedding representation where similar samples are close to each other, and different ones are far apart. We study generalization in contrastive learning, focusing on its simplest representative: Siamese Neural Networks (SNNs). We show that Double Descent also appears in SNNs and is exacerbated by noise. We point out that SNNs can be affected by two distinct sources of noise: Pair Label Noise (PLN) and Single Label Noise (SLN). The effect of SLN is asymmetric, but it preserves similarity relations, while PLN is symmetric but breaks transitivity. We show that the dataset topology crucially affects generalization. While sparse datasets show the same performances under SLN and PLN for an equal amount of noise, SLN outperforms PLN in the overparametrized region in dense datasets. Indeed, in this regime, PLN similarity violation becomes macroscopical, corrupting the dataset to the point where complete overfitting cannot be achieved. We call this phenomenon Density-Induced Break of Similarity (DIBS). We also probe the equivalence between online optimization and offline generalization for similarity tasks. We observe that an online/offline correspondence in similarity learning can be affected by both the network architecture and label noise.

(0 min) More than 70% of cloud computing is paid for but sits idle. A large fraction of these idle compute are cheap CPUs with few cores that are not utilized during the less busy hours. This paper aims to enable those CPU cycles to train heavyweight AI models. Our goal is against mainstream frameworks, which focus on leveraging expensive specialized ultra-high bandwidth interconnect to address the communication bottleneck in distributed neural network training. This paper presents a distributed model-parallel training framework that enables training large neural networks on small CPU clusters with low Internet bandwidth. We build upon the adaptive sparse training framework introduced by the SLIDE algorithm. By carefully deploying sparsity over distributed nodes, we demonstrate several orders of magnitude faster model parallel training than Horovod, the main engine behind most commercial software. We show that with reduced communication, due to sparsity, we can train close to a billion parameter model on simple 4-16 core CPU nodes connected by basic low bandwidth interconnect. Moreover, the training time is at par with some of the best hardware accelerators.

(0 min) We propose a novel method for training deep neural networks that are capable of interpolation, that is, driving the empirical loss to zero. At each iteration, our method constructs a stochastic approximation of the learning objective. The approximation, known as a bundle, is a pointwise maximum of linear functions. Our bundle contains a constant function that lower bounds the empirical loss. This enables us to compute an automatic adaptive learning rate, thereby providing an accurate solution. In addition, our bundle includes linear approximations computed at the current iterate and other linear estimates of the DNN parameters. The use of these additional approximations makes our method significantly more robust to its hyperparameters. Based on its desirable empirical properties, we term our method Bundle Optimisation for Robust and Accurate Training (BORAT). In order to operationalise BORAT, we design a novel algorithm for optimising the bundle approximation efficiently at each iteration. We establish the theoretical convergence of BORAT in both convex and non-convex settings. Using standard publicly available data sets, we provide a thorough comparison of BORAT to other single hyperparameter optimisation algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate BORAT matches the state-of-the-art generalisation performance for these methods and is the most robust.

(0 min) Multi-domain text classification (MDTC) aims to leverage all available resources from multiple domains to learn a predictive model that can generalize well on these domains. Recently, many MDTC methods adopt adversarial learning, shared-private paradigm, and entropy minimization to yield state-of-the-art results. However, these approaches face three issues: (1) Minimizing domain divergence can not fully guarantee the success of domain alignment; (2) Aligning marginal feature distributions can not fully guarantee the discriminability of the learned features; (3) Standard entropy minimization may make the predictions on unlabeled data over-confident, deteriorating the discriminability of the learned features. In order to address the above issues, we propose a co-regularized adversarial learning (CRAL) mechanism for MDTC. This approach constructs two diverse shared latent spaces, performs domain alignment in each of them, and punishes the disagreements of these two alignments with respect to the predictions on unlabeled data. Moreover, virtual adversarial training (VAT) with entropy minimization is incorporated to impose consistency regularization to the CRAL method. Experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two MDTC benchmarks.

(0 min) Neural networks are more expressive when they have multiple layers. In turn, conventional training methods are only successful if the depth does not lead to numerical issues such as exploding or vanishing gradients, which occur less frequently when the layers are sufficiently wide. However, increasing width to attain greater depth entails the use of heavier computational resources and leads to overparameterized models. These subsequent issues have been partially addressed by model compression methods such as quantization and pruning, some of which relying on normalization-based regularization of the loss function to make the effect of most parameters negligible. In this work, we propose instead to use regularization for preventing neurons from dying or becoming linear, a technique which we denote as jumpstart regularization. In comparison to conventional training, we obtain neural networks that are thinner, deeper, and - most importantly - more parameter-efficient.

(0 min) Modern machine learning architectures are often highly expressive. They are usually over-parameterized and can interpolate the data by driving the empirical loss close to zero. We analyze the convergence of Local SGD (or FedAvg) for such over-parameterized models in the heterogeneous data setting and improve upon the existing literature by establishing the following convergence rates. We show an error bound of $\O(\exp(-T))$ for strongly-convex loss functions, where $T$ is the total number of iterations. For general convex loss functions, we establish an error bound of $\O(1/T)$ under a mild data similarity assumption and an error bound of $\O(K/T)$ otherwise, where $K$ is the number of local steps. We also extend our results for non-convex loss functions by proving an error bound of $\O(K/T)$. Before our work, the best-known convergence rate for strongly-convex loss functions was $\O(\exp(-T/K))$, and none existed for general convex or non-convex loss functions under the overparameterized setting. We complete our results by providing problem instances in which such convergence rates are tight to a constant factor under a reasonably small stepsize scheme. Finally, we validate our theoretical results using numerical experiments on real and synthetic data.

(0 min) Prior studies using graph neural networks (GNNs) for image classification have focused on graphs generated from a regular grid of pixels or similar-sized superpixels. In the latter, a single target number of superpixels is defined for an entire dataset irrespective of differences across images and their intrinsic multiscale structure. On the contrary, this study investigates image classification using graphs generated from an image-specific number of multiscale superpixels. We propose WaveMesh, a new wavelet-based superpixeling algorithm, where the number and sizes of superpixels in an image are systematically computed based on its content. WaveMesh superpixel graphs are structurally different from similar-sized superpixel graphs. We use SplineCNN, a state-of-the-art network for image graph classification, to compare WaveMesh and similar-sized superpixels. Using SplineCNN, we perform extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets under three local-pooling settings: 1) no pooling, 2) GraclusPool, and 3) WavePool, a novel spatially heterogeneous pooling scheme tailored to WaveMesh superpixels. Our experiments demonstrate that SplineCNN learns from multiscale WaveMesh superpixels on-par with similar-sized superpixels. In all WaveMesh experiments, GraclusPool performs poorer than no pooling / WavePool, indicating that poor choice of pooling can result in inferior performance while learning from multiscale superpixels.

(0 min) This work theoretically studies stochastic neural networks, a main type of neural network in use. Specifically, we prove that as the width of an optimized stochastic neural network tends to infinity, its predictive variance on the training set decreases to zero. Two common examples that our theory applies to are neural networks with dropout and variational autoencoders. Our result helps better understand how stochasticity affects the learning of neural networks and thus design better architectures for practical problems.

(0 min) Computing the matrix square root and its inverse in a differentiable manner is important in a variety of computer vision tasks. Previous methods either adopt the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to explicitly factorize the matrix or use the Newton-Schulz iteration (NS iteration) to derive the approximate solution. However, both methods are not computationally efficient enough in either the forward pass or the backward pass. In this paper, we propose two more efficient variants to compute the differentiable matrix square root and the inverse square root. For the forward propagation, one method is to use Matrix Taylor Polynomial (MTP), and the other method is to use Matrix Pad\'e Approximants (MPA). The backward gradient is computed by iteratively solving the continuous-time Lyapunov equation using the matrix sign function. A series of numerical tests show that both methods yield considerable speed-up compared with the SVD or the NS iteration. Moreover, we validate the effectiveness of our methods in several real-world applications, including de-correlated batch normalization, second-order vision transformer, global covariance pooling for large-scale and fine-grained recognition, attentive covariance pooling for video recognition, and neural style transfer. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods can also achieve competitive and even slightly better performances. The Pytorch implementation is available at \href{https://github.com/KingJamesSong/FastDifferentiableMatSqrt}{https://github.com/KingJamesSong/FastDifferentiableMatSqrt}.

(0 min) Differing from the well-developed horizontal object detection area whereby the computing-friendly IoU based loss is readily adopted and well fits with the detection metrics. In contrast, rotation detectors often involve a more complicated loss based on SkewIoU which is unfriendly to gradient-based training. In this paper, we argue that one effective alternative is to devise an approximate loss who can achieve trend-level alignment with SkewIoU loss instead of the strict value-level identity. Specifically, we model the objects as Gaussian distribution and adopt Kalman filter to inherently mimic the mechanism of SkewIoU by its definition, and show its alignment with the SkewIoU at trend-level. This is in contrast to recent Gaussian modeling based rotation detectors e.g. GWD, KLD that involves a human-specified distribution distance metric which requires additional hyperparameter tuning. The resulting new loss called KFIoU is easier to implement and works better compared with exact SkewIoU, thanks to its full differentiability and ability to handle the non-overlapping cases. We further extend our technique to the 3-D case which also suffers from the same issues as 2-D detection. Extensive results on various public datasets (2-D/3-D, aerial/text/face images) with different base detectors show the effectiveness of our approach.

(0 min) A central tenet of Federated learning (FL), which trains models without centralizing user data, is privacy. However, previous work has shown that the gradient updates used in FL can leak user information. While the most industrial uses of FL are for text applications (e.g. keystroke prediction), nearly all attacks on FL privacy have focused on simple image classifiers. We propose a novel attack that reveals private user text by deploying malicious parameter vectors, and which succeeds even with mini-batches, multiple users, and long sequences. Unlike previous attacks on FL, the attack exploits characteristics of both the Transformer architecture and the token embedding, separately extracting tokens and positional embeddings to retrieve high-fidelity text. This work suggests that FL on text, which has historically been resistant to privacy attacks, is far more vulnerable than previously thought.

(0 min) Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) allow us to learn topologically-aware node embeddings, which can be useful for classification or link prediction. However, by construction, they lack positional awareness and are unable to capture long-range dependencies without adding additional layers -- which in turn leads to over-smoothing and increased time and space complexity. Further, the complex dependencies between nodes make mini-batching challenging, limiting their applicability to large graphs. This paper proposes a Scalable Multi-resolution Graph Representation Learning (SMGRL) framework that enables us to learn multi-resolution node embeddings efficiently. Our framework is model-agnostic and can be applied to any existing GCN model. We dramatically reduce training costs by training only on a reduced-dimension coarsening of the original graph, then exploit self-similarity to apply the resulting algorithm at multiple resolutions. Inference of these multi-resolution embeddings can be distributed across multiple machines to reduce computational and memory requirements further. The resulting multi-resolution embeddings can be aggregated to yield high-quality node embeddings that capture both long- and short-range dependencies between nodes. Our experiments show that this leads to improved classification accuracy, without incurring high computational costs.

(0 min) We introduce ApolloRL, an open platform for research in reinforcement learning for autonomous driving. The platform provides a complete closed-loop pipeline with training, simulation, and evaluation components. It comes with 300 hours of real-world data in driving scenarios and popular baselines such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agents. We elaborate in this paper on the architecture and the environment defined in the platform. In addition, we discuss the performance of the baseline agents in the ApolloRL environment.

(0 min) Several recent works use positional encodings to extend the receptive fields of graph neural network (GNN) layers equipped with attention mechanisms. These techniques, however, extend receptive fields to the complete graph, at substantial computational cost and risking a change in the inductive biases of conventional GNNs, or require complex architecture adjustments. As a conservative alternative, we use positional encodings to expand receptive fields to any r-ring. Our method augments the input graph with additional nodes/edges and uses positional encodings as node and/or edge features. Thus, it is compatible with many existing GNN architectures. We also provide examples of positional encodings that are non-invasive, i.e., there is a one-to-one map between the original and the modified graphs. Our experiments demonstrate that extending receptive fields via positional encodings and a virtual fully-connected node significantly improves GNN performance and alleviates over-squashing using small r. We obtain improvements across models, showing state-of-the-art performance even using older architectures than recent Transformer models adapted to graphs.

(0 min) Antibodies are canonically Y-shaped multimeric proteins capable of highly specific molecular recognition. The CDRH3 region located at the tip of variable chains of an antibody dominates antigen-binding specificity. Therefore, it is a priority to design optimal antigen-specific CDRH3 regions to develop therapeutic antibodies to combat harmful pathogens. However, the combinatorial nature of CDRH3 sequence space makes it impossible to search for an optimal binding sequence exhaustively and efficiently, especially not experimentally. Here, we present AntBO: a Combinatorial Bayesian Optimisation framework enabling efficient in silico design of the CDRH3 region. Ideally, antibodies should bind to their target antigen and be free from any harmful outcomes. Therefore, we introduce the CDRH3 trust region that restricts the search to sequences with feasible developability scores. To benchmark AntBO, we use the Absolut! software suite as a black-box oracle because it can score the target specificity and affinity of designed antibodies in silico in an unconstrained fashion. The results across 188 antigens demonstrate the benefit of AntBO in designing CDRH3 regions with diverse biophysical properties. In under 200 protein designs, AntBO can suggest antibody sequences that outperform the best binding sequence drawn from 6.9 million experimentally obtained CDRH3s and a commonly used genetic algorithm baseline. Additionally, AntBO finds very-high affinity CDRH3 sequences in only 38 protein designs whilst requiring no domain knowledge. We conclude AntBO brings automated antibody design methods closer to what is practically viable for in vitro experimentation.

(0 min) Humans excel at continually learning from an ever-changing environment whereas it remains a challenge for deep neural networks which exhibit catastrophic forgetting. The complementary learning system (CLS) theory suggests that the interplay between rapid instance-based learning and slow structured learning in the brain is crucial for accumulating and retaining knowledge. Here, we propose CLS-ER, a novel dual memory experience replay (ER) method which maintains short-term and long-term semantic memories that interact with the episodic memory. Our method employs an effective replay mechanism whereby new knowledge is acquired while aligning the decision boundaries with the semantic memories. CLS-ER does not utilize the task boundaries or make any assumption about the distribution of the data which makes it versatile and suited for "general continual learning". Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks as well as more realistic general continual learning settings.

(0 min) In recent years, identification of nonlinear dynamical systems from data has become increasingly popular. Sparse regression approaches, such as Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy), fostered the development of novel governing equation identification algorithms assuming the state variables are known a priori and the governing equations lend themselves to sparse, linear expansions in a (nonlinear) basis of the state variables. In the context of the identification of governing equations of nonlinear dynamical systems, one faces the problem of identifiability of model parameters when state measurements are corrupted by noise. Measurement noise affects the stability of the recovery process yielding incorrect sparsity patterns and inaccurate estimation of coefficients of the governing equations. In this work, we investigate and compare the performance of several local and global smoothing techniques to a priori denoise the state measurements and numerically estimate the state time-derivatives to improve the accuracy and robustness of two sparse regression methods to recover governing equations: Sequentially Thresholded Least Squares (STLS) and Weighted Basis Pursuit Denoising (WBPDN) algorithms. We empirically show that, in general, global methods, which use the entire measurement data set, outperform local methods, which employ a neighboring data subset around a local point. We additionally compare Generalized Cross Validation (GCV) and Pareto curve criteria as model selection techniques to automatically estimate near optimal tuning parameters, and conclude that Pareto curves yield better results. The performance of the denoising strategies and sparse regression methods is empirically evaluated through well-known benchmark problems of nonlinear dynamical systems.

(0 min) Implicit neural representations with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have recently gained prominence for a wide variety of tasks such as novel view synthesis and 3D object representation and rendering. However, a significant challenge with these representations is that both training and inference with an MLP over a large number of input coordinates to learn and represent an image, video, or 3D object, require large amounts of computation and incur long processing times. In this work, we aim to accelerate inference and training of coordinate-based MLPs for implicit neural representations by proposing a new split MLP architecture, CoordX. With CoordX, the initial layers are split to learn each dimension of the input coordinates separately. The intermediate features are then fused by the last layers to generate the learned signal at the corresponding coordinate point. This significantly reduces the amount of computation required and leads to large speedups in training and inference, while achieving similar accuracy as the baseline MLP. This approach thus aims at first learning functions that are a decomposition of the original signal and then fusing them to generate the learned signal. Our proposed architecture can be generally used for many implicit neural representation tasks with no additional memory overheads. We demonstrate a speedup of up to 2.92x compared to the baseline model for image, video, and 3D shape representation and rendering tasks.

(0 min) Protecting the privacy of people whose data is used by machine learning algorithms is important. Differential Privacy is the appropriate mathematical framework for formal guarantees of privacy, and boosted decision trees are a popular machine learning technique. So we propose and test a practical algorithm for boosting decision trees that guarantees differential privacy. Privacy is enforced because our booster never puts too much weight on any one example; this ensures that each individual's data never influences a single tree "too much." Experiments show that this boosting algorithm can produce better model sparsity and accuracy than other differentially private ensemble classifiers.

(0 min) This paper demonstrates the systematic use of combinatorial coverage for selecting and characterizing test and training sets for machine learning models. The presented work adapts combinatorial interaction testing, which has been successfully leveraged in identifying faults in software testing, to characterize data used in machine learning. The MNIST hand-written digits data is used to demonstrate that combinatorial coverage can be used to select test sets that stress machine learning model performance, to select training sets that lead to robust model performance, and to select data for fine-tuning models to new domains. Thus, the results posit combinatorial coverage as a holistic approach to training and testing for machine learning. In contrast to prior work which has focused on the use of coverage in regard to the internal of neural networks, this paper considers coverage over simple features derived from inputs and outputs. Thus, this paper addresses the case where the supplier of test and training sets for machine learning models does not have intellectual property rights to the models themselves. Finally, the paper addresses prior criticism of combinatorial coverage and provides a rebuttal which advocates the use of coverage metrics in machine learning applications.

(0 min) One of the central problems in auction design is developing an incentive-compatible mechanism that maximizes the auctioneer's expected revenue. While theoretical approaches have encountered bottlenecks in multi-item auctions, recently, there has been much progress on finding the optimal mechanism through deep learning. However, these works either focus on a fixed set of bidders and items, or restrict the auction to be symmetric. In this work, we overcome such limitations by factoring \emph{public} contextual information of bidders and items into the auction learning framework. We propose $\mathtt{CITransNet}$, a context-integrated transformer-based neural network for optimal auction design, which maintains permutation-equivariance over bids and contexts while being able to find asymmetric solutions. We show by extensive experiments that $\mathtt{CITransNet}$ can recover the known optimal solutions in single-item settings, outperform strong baselines in multi-item auctions, and generalize well to cases other than those in training.

(0 min) As a promising method of central model training on decentralized device data while securing user privacy, Federated Learning (FL)is becoming popular in Internet of Things (IoT) design. However, when the data collected by IoT devices are highly skewed in a non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) manner, the accuracy of vanilla FL method cannot be guaranteed. Although there exist various solutions that try to address the bottleneck of FL with non-IID data, most of them suffer from extra intolerable communication overhead and low model accuracy. To enable fast and accurate FL, this paper proposes a novel data-based device grouping approach that can effectively reduce the disadvantages of weight divergence during the training of non-IID data. However, since our grouping method is based on the similarity of extracted feature maps from IoT devices, it may incur additional risks of privacy exposure. To solve this problem, we propose an improved version by exploiting similarity information using the Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) algorithm without exposing extracted feature maps. Comprehensive experimental results on well-known benchmarks show that our approach can not only accelerate the convergence rate, but also improve the prediction accuracy for FL with non-IID data.

(0 min) We consider the safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem of maximizing utility while satisfying provided constraints. Since we do not assume any prior knowledge or pre-training of the safety concept, we are interested in asymptotic constraint satisfaction. A popular approach in this line of research is to combine the Lagrangian method with a model-free RL algorithm to adjust the weight of the constraint reward dynamically. It relies on a single policy to handle the conflict between utility and constraint rewards, which is often challenging. Inspired by the safety layer design (Dalal et al., 2018), we propose to separately learn a safety editor policy that transforms potentially unsafe actions output by a utility maximizer policy into safe ones. The safety editor is trained to maximize the constraint reward while minimizing a hinge loss of the utility Q values of actions before and after the edit. On 12 custom Safety Gym (Ray et al., 2019) tasks and 2 safe racing tasks with very harsh constraint thresholds, our approach demonstrates outstanding utility performance while complying with the constraints. Ablation studies reveal that our two-policy design is critical. Simply doubling the model capacity of typical single-policy approaches will not lead to comparable results. The Q hinge loss is also important in certain circumstances, and replacing it with the usual L2 distance could fail badly.

(0 min) A new source model, which consists of an intrinsic state part and an extrinsic observation part, is proposed and its information-theoretic characterization, namely its rate-distortion function, is defined and analyzed. Such a source model is motivated by the recent surge of interest in the semantic aspect of information: the intrinsic state corresponds to the semantic feature of the source, which in general is not observable but can only be inferred from the extrinsic observation. There are two distortion measures, one between the intrinsic state and its reproduction, and the other between the extrinsic observation and its reproduction. Under a given code rate, the tradeoff between these two distortion measures is characterized by the rate-distortion function, which is solved via the indirect rate-distortion theory and is termed as the semantic rate-distortion function of the source. As an application of the general model and its analysis, the case of Gaussian extrinsic observation is studied, assuming a linear relationship between the intrinsic state and the extrinsic observation, under a quadratic distortion structure. The semantic rate-distortion function is shown to be the solution of a convex programming programming with respect to an error covariance matrix, and a reverse water-filling type of solution is provided when the model further satisfies a diagonalizability condition.

(0 min) Self-supervised contrastive learning has recently been shown to be very effective in preventing deep networks from overfitting noisy labels. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of the effect of contrastive learning on boosting robustness is very limited. In this work, we rigorously prove that the representation matrix learned by contrastive learning boosts robustness, by having: (i) one prominent singular value corresponding to every sub-class in the data, and remaining significantly smaller singular values; and (ii) a large alignment between the prominent singular vector and the clean labels of each sub-class. The above properties allow a linear layer trained on the representations to quickly learn the clean labels, and prevent it from overfitting the noise for a large number of training iterations. We further show that the low-rank structure of the Jacobian of deep networks pre-trained with contrastive learning allows them to achieve a superior performance initially, when fine-tuned on noisy labels. Finally, we demonstrate that the initial robustness provided by contrastive learning enables robust training methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance under extreme noise levels, e.g., an average of 27.18\% and 15.58\% increase in accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with 80\% symmetric noisy labels, and 4.11\% increase in accuracy on WebVision.

(0 min) Distributed methods for training models on graph datasets have recently grown in popularity, due to the size of graph datasets as well as the private nature of graphical data like social networks. However, the graphical structure of this data means that it cannot be disjointly partitioned between different learning clients, leading to either significant communication overhead between clients or a loss of information available to the training method. We introduce Federated Graph Convolutional Network (FedGCN), which uses federated learning to train GCN models with optimized convergence rate and communication cost. Compared to prior methods that require communication among clients at each iteration, FedGCN preserves the privacy of client data and only needs communication at the initial step, which greatly reduces communication cost and speeds up the convergence rate. We theoretically analyze the tradeoff between FedGCN's convergence rate and communication cost under different data distributions, introducing a general framework can be generally used for the analysis of all edge-completion-based GCN training algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm and validate our theoretical analysis.

(0 min) Certified robustness in machine learning has primarily focused on adversarial perturbations of the input with a fixed attack budget for each point in the data distribution. In this work, we present provable robustness guarantees on the accuracy of a model under bounded Wasserstein shifts of the data distribution. We show that a simple procedure that randomizes the input of the model within a transformation space is provably robust to distributional shifts under the transformation. Our framework allows the datum-specific perturbation size to vary across different points in the input distribution and is general enough to include fixed-sized perturbations as well. Our certificates produce guaranteed lower bounds on the performance of the model for any (natural or adversarial) shift of the input distribution within a Wasserstein ball around the original distribution. We apply our technique to: (i) certify robustness against natural (non-adversarial) transformations of images such as color shifts, hue shifts and changes in brightness and saturation, (ii) certify robustness against adversarial shifts of the input distribution, and (iii) show provable lower bounds (hardness results) on the performance of models trained on so-called "unlearnable" datasets that have been poisoned to interfere with model training.

(0 min) Counterfactual explanations are attracting significant attention due to the flourishing applications of machine learning models in consequential domains. A counterfactual plan consists of multiple possibilities to modify a given instance so that the model's prediction will be altered. As the predictive model can be updated subject to the future arrival of new data, a counterfactual plan may become ineffective or infeasible with respect to the future values of the model parameters. In this work, we study the counterfactual plans under model uncertainty, in which the distribution of the model parameters is partially prescribed using only the first- and second-moment information. First, we propose an uncertainty quantification tool to compute the lower and upper bounds of the probability of validity for any given counterfactual plan. We then provide corrective methods to adjust the counterfactual plan to improve the validity measure. The numerical experiments validate our bounds and demonstrate that our correction increases the robustness of the counterfactual plans in different real-world datasets.

(0 min) Cooperative artificial intelligence with human or superhuman proficiency in collaborative tasks stands at the frontier of machine learning research. Prior work has tended to evaluate cooperative AI performance under the restrictive paradigms of self-play (teams composed of agents trained together) and cross-play (teams of agents trained independently but using the same algorithm). Recent work has indicated that AI optimized for these narrow settings may make for undesirable collaborators in the real-world. We formalize an alternative criteria for evaluating cooperative AI, referred to as inter-algorithm cross-play, where agents are evaluated on teaming performance with all other agents within an experiment pool with no assumption of algorithmic similarities between agents. We show that existing state-of-the-art cooperative AI algorithms, such as Other-Play and Off-Belief Learning, under-perform in this paradigm. We propose the Any-Play learning augmentation -- a multi-agent extension of diversity-based intrinsic rewards for zero-shot coordination (ZSC) -- for generalizing self-play-based algorithms to the inter-algorithm cross-play setting. We apply the Any-Play learning augmentation to the Simplified Action Decoder (SAD) and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in the collaborative card game Hanabi.

(0 min) In computational design and fabrication, neural networks are becoming important surrogates for bulky forward simulations. A long-standing, intertwined question is that of inverse design: how to compute a design that satisfies a desired target performance? Here, we show that the piecewise linear property, very common in everyday neural networks, allows for an inverse design formulation based on mixed-integer linear programming. Our mixed-integer inverse design uncovers globally optimal or near optimal solutions in a principled manner. Furthermore, our method significantly facilitates emerging, but challenging, combinatorial inverse design tasks, such as material selection. For problems where finding the optimal solution is not desirable or tractable, we develop an efficient yet near-optimal hybrid optimization. Eventually, our method is able to find solutions provably robust to possible fabrication perturbations among multiple designs with similar performances.

(0 min) The rapid developments in advanced sensing and imaging bring about a data-rich environment, facilitating the effective modeling, monitoring, and control of complex systems. For example, the body-sensor network captures multi-channel information pertinent to the electrical activity of the heart (i.e., electrocardiograms (ECG)), which enables medical scientists to monitor and detect abnormal cardiac conditions. However, the high-dimensional sensing data are generally complexly structured and realizing the full data potential depends to a great extent on advanced analytical and predictive methods. This paper presents a physics-constrained deep learning (P-DL) framework for high-dimensional inverse ECG modeling. This method integrates the physical laws of the complex system with the advanced deep learning infrastructure for effective prediction of the system dynamics. The proposed P-DL approach is implemented to solve the inverse ECG model and predict the time-varying distribution of electric potentials in the heart from the ECG data measured by the body-surface sensor network. Experimental results show that the proposed P-DL method significantly outperforms existing methods that are commonly used in current practice.

(0 min) Bilevel optimization has recently attracted growing interests due to its wide applications in modern machine learning problems. Although recent studies have characterized the convergence rate for several such popular algorithms, it is still unclear how much further these convergence rates can be improved. In this paper, we address this fundamental question from two perspectives. First, we provide the first-known lower complexity bounds of $\widetilde{\Omega}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\mu_x}\mu_y})$ and $\widetilde \Omega\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\epsilon}}\min\{\frac{1}{\mu_y},\frac{1}{\sqrt{\epsilon^{3}}}\}\big)$ respectively for strongly-convex-strongly-convex and convex-strongly-convex bilevel optimizations. Second, we propose an accelerated bilevel optimizer named AccBiO, for which we provide the first-known complexity bounds without the gradient boundedness assumption (which was made in existing analyses) under the two aforementioned geometries. We also provide significantly tighter upper bounds than the existing complexity when the bounded gradient assumption does hold. We show that AccBiO achieves the optimal results (i.e., the upper and lower bounds match up to logarithmic factors) when the inner-level problem takes a quadratic form with a constant-level condition number. Interestingly, our lower bounds under both geometries are larger than the corresponding optimal complexities of minimax optimization, establishing that bilevel optimization is provably more challenging than minimax optimization.

(0 min) The successful application of machine learning (ML) methods becomes increasingly dependent on their interpretability or explainability. Designing explainable ML systems is instrumental to ensuring transparency of automated decision-making that targets humans. The explainability of ML methods is also an essential ingredient for trustworthy artificial intelligence. A key challenge in ensuring explainability is its dependence on the specific human user ("explainee"). The users of machine learning methods might have vastly different background knowledge about machine learning principles. One user might have a university degree in machine learning or related fields, while another user might have never received formal training in high-school mathematics. This paper applies information-theoretic concepts to develop a novel measure for the subjective explainability of the predictions delivered by a ML method. We construct this measure via the conditional entropy of predictions, given a user signal. This user signal might be obtained from user surveys or biophysical measurements. Our main contribution is the explainable empirical risk minimization (EERM) principle of learning a hypothesis that optimally balances between the subjective explainability and risk. The EERM principle is flexible and can be combined with arbitrary machine learning models. We present several practical implementations of EERM for linear models and decision trees. Numerical experiments demonstrate the application of EERM to detecting the use of inappropriate language on social media.

(0 min) In the era of pre-trained language models, Transformers are the de facto choice of model architectures. While recent research has shown promise in entirely convolutional, or CNN, architectures, they have not been explored using the pre-train-fine-tune paradigm. In the context of language models, are convolutional models competitive to Transformers when pre-trained? This paper investigates this research question and presents several interesting findings. Across an extensive set of experiments on 8 datasets/tasks, we find that CNN-based pre-trained models are competitive and outperform their Transformer counterpart in certain scenarios, albeit with caveats. Overall, the findings outlined in this paper suggest that conflating pre-training and architectural advances is misguided and that both advances should be considered independently. We believe our research paves the way for a healthy amount of optimism in alternative architectures.

(0 min) In this work, we develop methods for few-shot image classification from a new perspective of optimal matching between image regions. We employ the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) as a metric to compute a structural distance between dense image representations to determine image relevance. The EMD generates the optimal matching flows between structural elements that have the minimum matching cost, which is used to calculate the image distance for classification. To generate the important weights of elements in the EMD formulation, we design a cross-reference mechanism, which can effectively alleviate the adverse impact caused by the cluttered background and large intra-class appearance variations. To implement k-shot classification, we propose to learn a structured fully connected layer that can directly classify dense image representations with the EMD. Based on the implicit function theorem, the EMD can be inserted as a layer into the network for end-to-end training. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our algorithm which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on five widely used few-shot classification benchmarks, namely, miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, Fewshot-CIFAR100 (FC100), Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 (CUB), and CIFAR-FewShot (CIFAR-FS). We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the image retrieval task in our experiments.

(0 min) Although machine learning (ML) has been successful in automating various software engineering needs, software testing still remains a highly challenging topic. In this paper, we aim to improve the generative testing of software by directly augmenting the random number generator (RNG) with a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent using an efficient, automatically extractable state representation of the software under test. Using the Cosmos SDK as the testbed, we show that the proposed DeepRNG framework provides a statistically significant improvement to the testing of the highly complex software library with over 350,000 lines of code. The source code of the DeepRNG framework is publicly available online.

(0 min) Aqueous hydrolysis is used to chemically recycle polyethylene terephthalate (PET) due to the production of high-quality terephthalic acid (TPA), the PET monomer. PET hydrolysis depends on various reaction conditions including PET size, catalyst concentration, reaction temperature, etc. So, modeling PET hydrolysis by considering the effective factors can provide useful information for material scientists to specify how to design and run these reactions. It will save time, energy, and materials by optimizing the hydrolysis conditions. Machine learning algorithms enable to design models to predict output results. For the first time, 381 experimental data were gathered to model the aqueous hydrolysis of PET. Effective reaction conditions on PET hydrolysis were connected to TPA yield. The logistic regression was applied to rank the reaction conditions. Two algorithms were proposed, artificial neural network multilayer perceptron (ANN-MLP) and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The dataset was divided into training and testing sets to train and test the models, respectively. The models predicted TPA yield sufficiently where the ANFIS model outperformed. R-squared (R2) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) loss functions were employed to measure the efficiency of the models and evaluate their performance.

(0 min) Motivation: The branching processes model yields unevenly stochastically distributed data that consists of sparse and dense regions. The work tries to solve the problem of a precise evaluation of a parameter for this type of model. The application of the branching processes model to cancer cell evolution has many difficulties like high dimensionality and the rare appearance of a result of interest. Moreover, we would like to solve the ambitious task of obtaining the coefficients of the model reflecting the relationship of driver genes mutations and cancer hallmarks on the basis of personal data of variant allele frequencies. Results: The Approximate Bayesian computation method based on the Isolation kernel is designed. The method includes a transformation row data to a Hilbert space (mapping) and measures the similarity between simulation points and maxima weighted Isolation kernel mapping related to the observation point. Also, we designed a heuristic algorithm to find parameter estimation without gradient calculation and dimension-independent. The advantage of the proposed machine learning method is shown for multidimensional test data as well as for an example of cancer cell evolution.

(0 min) An unaddressed challenge in human-AI coordination is to enable AI agents to exploit the semantic relationships between the features of actions and the features of observations. Humans take advantage of these relationships in highly intuitive ways. For instance, in the absence of a shared language, we might point to the object we desire or hold up our fingers to indicate how many objects we want. To address this challenge, we investigate the effect of network architecture on the propensity of learning algorithms to exploit these semantic relationships. Across a procedurally generated coordination task, we find that attention-based architectures that jointly process a featurized representation of observations and actions have a better inductive bias for zero-shot coordination. Through fine-grained evaluation and scenario analysis, we show that the resulting policies are human-interpretable. Moreover, such agents coordinate with people without training on any human data.

(0 min) Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of good users share the same instance of contextual bandits with $S$ contexts and $A$ actions (items). Naturally, whether a user is good or adversarial is not known in advance. The goal is to robustly learn the policy that maximizes rewards for good users with as few user interactions as possible. Without adversarial users, established results in collaborative filtering show that $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ per-user interactions suffice to learn a good policy, precisely because information can be shared across users. This parallelization gain is fundamentally altered by the presence of adversarial users: unless there are super-polynomial number of users, we show a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(\min(S,A) \cdot \alpha^2 / \epsilon^2)$ {\it per-user} interactions to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for the good users. We then show we can achieve an $\tilde{O}(\min(S,A)\cdot \alpha/\epsilon^2)$ upper-bound, by employing efficient robust mean estimators for both uni-variate and high-dimensional random variables. We also show that this can be improved depending on the distributions of contexts.

(0 min) In this manuscript, we consider the problem of kernel classification under the Gaussian data design, and under source and capacity assumptions on the dataset. While the decay rates of the prediction error have been extensively studied under much more generic assumptions for kernel ridge regression, deriving decay rates for the classification problem has been hitherto considered a much more challenging task. In this work we leverage recent analytical results for learning curves of linear classification with generic loss function to derive the rates of decay of the misclassification (prediction) error with the sample complexity for two standard classification settings, namely margin-maximizing Support Vector Machines (SVM) and ridge classification. Using numerical and analytical arguments, we derive the error rates as a function of the source and capacity coefficients, and contrast the two methods.

(0 min) Stochastic graph neural networks (SGNNs) are information processing architectures that learn representations from data over random graphs. SGNNs are trained with respect to the expected performance, which comes with no guarantee about deviations of particular output realizations around the optimal expectation. To overcome this issue, we propose a variance-constrained optimization problem for SGNNs, balancing the expected performance and the stochastic deviation. An alternating primal-dual learning procedure is undertaken that solves the problem by updating the SGNN parameters with gradient descent and the dual variable with gradient ascent. To characterize the explicit effect of the variance-constrained learning, we conduct a theoretical analysis on the variance of the SGNN output and identify a trade-off between the stochastic robustness and the discrimination power. We further analyze the duality gap of the variance-constrained optimization problem and the converging behavior of the primal-dual learning procedure. The former indicates the optimality loss induced by the dual transformation and the latter characterizes the limiting error of the iterative algorithm, both of which guarantee the performance of the variance-constrained learning. Through numerical simulations, we corroborate our theoretical findings and observe a strong expected performance with a controllable standard deviation.

(0 min) While deep learning-based sequential recommender systems are widely used in practice, their sensitivity to untargeted training data perturbations is unknown. Untargeted perturbations aim to modify ranked recommendation lists for all users at test time, by inserting imperceptible input perturbations during training time. Existing perturbation methods are mostly targeted attacks optimized to change ranks of target items, but not suitable for untargeted scenarios. In this paper, we develop a novel framework in which user-item training interactions are perturbed in unintentional and adversarial settings. First, through comprehensive experiments on four datasets, we show that four popular recommender models are unstable against even one random perturbation. Second, we establish a cascading effect in which minor manipulations of early training interactions can cause extensive changes to the model and the generated recommendations for all users. Leveraging this effect, we propose an adversarial perturbation method CASPER which identifies and perturbs an interaction that induces the maximal cascading effect. Experimentally, we demonstrate that CASPER reduces the stability of recommendation models the most, compared to several baselines and state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we show the runtime and success of CASPER scale near-linearly with the dataset size and the number of perturbations, respectively.

(0 min) In order for humans to confidently decide where to employ RL agents for real-world tasks, a human developer must validate that the agent will perform well at test-time. Some policy interpretability methods facilitate this by capturing the policy's decision making in a set of agent rollouts. However, even the most informative trajectories of training time behavior may give little insight into the agent's behavior out of distribution. In contrast, our method conveys how the agent performs under distribution shifts by showing the agent's behavior across a wider trajectory distribution. We generate these trajectories by guiding the agent to more diverse unseen states and showing the agent's behavior there. In a user study, we demonstrate that our method enables users to score better than baseline methods on one of two agent validation tasks.

(0 min) Online advertising has typically been more personalized than offline advertising, through the use of machine learning models and real-time auctions for ad targeting. One specific task, predicting the likelihood of conversion (i.e.\ the probability a user will purchase the advertised product), is crucial to the advertising ecosystem for both targeting and pricing ads. Currently, these models are often trained by observing individual user behavior, but, increasingly, regulatory and technical constraints are requiring privacy-preserving approaches. For example, major platforms are moving to restrict tracking individual user events across multiple applications, and governments around the world have shown steadily more interest in regulating the use of personal data. Instead of receiving data about individual user behavior, advertisers may receive privacy-preserving feedback, such as the number of installs of an advertised app that resulted from a group of users. In this paper we outline the recent privacy-related changes in the online advertising ecosystem from a machine learning perspective. We provide an overview of the challenges and constraints when learning conversion models in this setting. We introduce a novel approach for training these models that makes use of post-ranking signals. We show using offline experiments on real world data that it outperforms a model relying on opt-in data alone, and significantly reduces model degradation when no individual labels are available. Finally, we discuss future directions for research in this evolving area.

(0 min) One way to interpret the behavior of a blackbox recurrent neural network (RNN) is to extract from it a more interpretable discrete computational model, like a finite state machine, that captures its behavior. In this work, we propose a new method for extracting finite automata from RNNs inspired by the state merging paradigm from grammatical inference. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the Tomita languages benchmark, where we find that it is able to extract faithful automata from RNNs trained on all languages in the benchmark. We find that extraction performance is aided by the number of data provided during the extraction process, as well as, curiously, whether the RNN model is trained for additional epochs after perfectly learning its target language. We use our method to analyze this phenomenon, finding that training beyond convergence is useful because it leads to compression of the internal state space of the RNN. This finding demonstrates how our method can be used for interpretability and analysis of trained RNN models.

(0 min) If the trend of learned components eventually outperforming their hand-crafted version continues, learned optimizers will eventually outperform hand-crafted optimizers like SGD or Adam. Even if learned optimizers (L2Os) eventually outpace hand-crafted ones in practice however, they are still not provably convergent and might fail out of distribution. These are the questions addressed here. Currently, learned optimizers frequently outperform generic hand-crafted optimizers (such as gradient descent) at the beginning of learning but they generally plateau after some time while the generic algorithms continue to make progress and often overtake the learned algorithm as Aesop's tortoise which overtakes the hare and are not. L2Os also still have a difficult time generalizing out of distribution. (Heaton et al., 2020) proposed Safeguarded L2O (GL2O) which can take a learned optimizer and safeguard it with a generic learning algorithm so that by conditionally switching between the two, the resulting algorithm is provably convergent. We propose a new class of Safeguarded L2O, called Loss-Guarded L2O (LGL2O), which is both conceptually simpler and computationally less expensive. The guarding mechanism decides solely based on the expected future loss value of both optimizers. Furthermore, we show theoretical proof of LGL2O's convergence guarantee and empirical results comparing to GL2O and other baselines showing that it combines the best of both L2O and SGD and and in practice converges much better than GL2O.

(0 min) Fully-analog in-memory computing (IMC) architectures that implement both matrix-vector multiplication and non-linear vector operations within the same memory array have shown promising performance benefits over conventional IMC systems due to the removal of energy-hungry signal conversion units. However, maintaining the computation in the analog domain for the entire deep neural network (DNN) comes with potential sensitivity to interconnect parasitics. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the effect of wire parasitic resistance and capacitance on the accuracy of DNN models deployed on fully-analog IMC architectures. Moreover, we propose a partitioning mechanism to alleviate the impact of the parasitic while keeping the computation in the analog domain through dividing large arrays into multiple partitions. The SPICE circuit simulation results for a 400 X 120 X 84 X 10 DNN model deployed on a fully-analog IMC circuit show that a 94.84% accuracy could be achieved for MNIST classification application with 16, 8, and 8 horizontal partitions, as well as 8, 8, and 1 vertical partitions for first, second, and third layers of the DNN, respectively, which is comparable to the ~97% accuracy realized by digital implementation on CPU. It is shown that accuracy benefits are achieved at the cost of higher power consumption due to the extra circuitry required for handling partitioning.

(0 min) There have been growing interests in leveraging experimental measurements to discover the underlying partial differential equations (PDEs) that govern complex physical phenomena. Although past research attempts have achieved great success in data-driven PDE discovery, the robustness of the existing methods cannot be guaranteed when dealing with low-quality measurement data. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel physics-encoded discrete learning framework for discovering spatiotemporal PDEs from scarce and noisy data. The general idea is to (1) firstly introduce a novel deep convolutional-recurrent network, which can encode prior physics knowledge (e.g., known PDE terms, assumed PDE structure, initial/boundary conditions, etc.) while remaining flexible on representation capability, to accurately reconstruct high-fidelity data, and (2) perform sparse regression with the reconstructed data to identify the explicit form of the governing PDEs. We validate our method on three nonlinear PDE systems. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over baseline models are demonstrated.

(0 min) We present an error-neural-modeling-based strategy for approximating two-dimensional curvature in the level-set method. Our main contribution is a redesigned hybrid solver (Larios-C\'{a}rdenas and Gibou (2021)[1]) that relies on numerical schemes to enable machine-learning operations on demand. In particular, our routine features double predicting to harness curvature symmetry invariance in favor of precision and stability. As in [1], the core of this solver is a multilayer perceptron trained on circular- and sinusoidal-interface samples. Its role is to quantify the error in numerical curvature approximations and emit corrected estimates for select grid vertices along the free boundary. These corrections arise in response to preprocessed context level-set, curvature, and gradient data. To promote neural capacity, we have adopted sample negative-curvature normalization, reorientation, and reflection-based augmentation. In the same manner, our system incorporates dimensionality reduction, well-balancedness, and regularization to minimize outlying effects. Our training approach is likewise scalable across mesh sizes. For this purpose, we have introduced dimensionless parametrization and probabilistic subsampling during data production. Together, all these elements have improved the accuracy and efficiency of curvature calculations around under-resolved regions. In most experiments, our strategy has outperformed the numerical baseline at twice the number of redistancing steps while requiring only a fraction of the cost.

(0 min) This work addresses the problem of sensing the world: how to learn a multimodal representation of a reinforcement learning agent's environment that allows the execution of tasks under incomplete perceptual conditions. To address such problem, we argue for hierarchy in the design of representation models and contribute with a novel multimodal representation model, MUSE. The proposed model learns hierarchical representations: low-level modality-specific representations, encoded from raw observation data, and a high-level multimodal representation, encoding joint-modality information to allow robust state estimation. We employ MUSE as the sensory representation model of deep reinforcement learning agents provided with multimodal observations in Atari games. We perform a comparative study over different designs of reinforcement learning agents, showing that MUSE allows agents to perform tasks under incomplete perceptual experience with minimal performance loss. Finally, we evaluate the performance of MUSE in literature-standard multimodal scenarios with higher number and more complex modalities, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal variational autoencoders in single and cross-modality generation.

(0 min) In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework for semi-discrete optimization using ideas from optimal transport. Our primary motivation is in the field of deep learning, and specifically in the task of neural architecture search. With this aim in mind, we discuss the geometric and theoretical motivation for new techniques for neural architecture search (in a companion paper we show that algorithms inspired by our framework are competitive with contemporaneous methods). We introduce a Riemannian-like metric on the space of probability measures over a semi-discrete space $\mathbb{R}^d \times \mathcal{G}$ where $\mathcal{G}$ is a finite weighted graph. With such Riemmanian structure in hand, we derive formal expressions for the gradient flow of a relative entropy functional, as well as second order dynamics for the optimization of said energy. Then, with the aim of providing a rigorous motivation for the gradient flow equations derived formally, we also consider an iterative procedure known as minimizing movement scheme (i.e., Implicit Euler scheme, or JKO scheme) and apply it to the relative entropy with respect to a suitable cost function. For some specific choices of metric and cost, we rigorously show that the minimizing movement scheme of the relative entropy functional converges to the gradient flow process provided by the formal Riemannian structure. This flow coincides with a system of reaction-diffusion equations on $\mathbb{R}^d$.

(0 min) Linear regression is a supervised method that has been widely used in classification tasks. In order to apply linear regression to classification tasks, a technique for relaxing regression targets was proposed. However, methods based on this technique ignore the pressure on a single transformation matrix due to the complex information contained in the data. A single transformation matrix in this case is too strict to provide a flexible projection, thus it is necessary to adopt relaxation on transformation matrix. This paper proposes a double transformation matrices learning method based on latent low-rank feature extraction. The core idea is to use double transformation matrices for relaxation, and jointly projecting the learned principal and salient features from two directions into the label space, which can share the pressure of a single transformation matrix. Firstly, the low-rank features are learned by the latent low rank representation (LatLRR) method which processes the original data from two directions. In this process, sparse noise is also separated, which alleviates its interference on projection learning to some extent. Then, two transformation matrices are introduced to process the two features separately, and the information useful for the classification is extracted. Finally, the two transformation matrices can be easily obtained by alternate optimization methods. Through such processing, even when a large amount of redundant information is contained in samples, our method can also obtain projection results that are easy to classify. Experiments on multiple data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for classification, especially for complex scenarios.

(0 min) This paper proposes convolutional filtering for data whose structure can be modeled by a simplicial complex (SC). SCs are mathematical tools that not only capture pairwise relationships as graphs but account also for higher-order network structures. These filters are built by following the shift-and-sum principle of the convolution operation and rely on the Hodge-Laplacians to shift the signal within the simplex. But since in SCs we have also inter-simplex coupling, we use the incidence matrices to transfer the signal in adjacent simplices and build a filter bank to jointly filter signals from different levels. We prove some interesting properties for the proposed filter bank, including permutation and orientation equivariance, a computational complexity that is linear in the SC dimension, and a spectral interpretation using the simplicial Fourier transform. We illustrate the proposed approach with numerical experiments.

(0 min) We consider a sequential decision making problem where the agent faces the environment characterized by the stochastic discrete events and seeks an optimal intervention policy such that its long-term reward is maximized. This problem exists ubiquitously in social media, finance and health informatics but is rarely investigated by the conventional research in reinforcement learning. To this end, we present a novel framework of the model-based reinforcement learning where the agent's actions and observations are asynchronous stochastic discrete events occurring in continuous-time. We model the dynamics of the environment by Hawkes process with external intervention control term and develop an algorithm to embed such process in the Bellman equation which guides the direction of the value gradient. We demonstrate the superiority of our method in both synthetic simulator and real-world problem.

(0 min) Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been increasingly deployed in various applications that involve learning on non-Euclidean data. However, recent studies show that GNNs are vulnerable to graph adversarial attacks. Although there are several defense methods to improve GNN robustness by eliminating adversarial components, they may also impair the underlying clean graph structure that contributes to GNN training. In addition, few of those defense models can scale to large graphs due to their high computational complexity and memory usage. In this paper, we propose GARNET, a scalable spectral method to boost the adversarial robustness of GNN models. GARNET first leverages weighted spectral embedding to construct a base graph, which is not only resistant to adversarial attacks but also contains critical (clean) graph structure for GNN training. Next, GARNET further refines the base graph by pruning additional uncritical edges based on probabilistic graphical model. GARNET has been evaluated on various datasets, including a large graph with millions of nodes. Our extensive experiment results show that GARNET achieves adversarial accuracy improvement and runtime speedup over state-of-the-art GNN (defense) models by up to 13.27% and 14.7x, respectively.

(2 min) Imperfect labels are ubiquitous in real-world datasets and seriously harm the model performance. Several recent effective methods for handling noisy labels have two key steps: 1) dividing samples into cleanly labeled and wrongly labeled sets by training loss, 2) using semi-supervised methods to generate pseudo-labels for samples in the wrongly labeled set. However, current methods always hurt the informative hard samples due to the similar loss distribution between the hard samples and the noisy ones. In this paper, we proposed PGDF (Prior Guided Denoising Framework), a novel framework to learn a deep model to suppress noise by generating the samples' prior knowledge, which is integrated into both dividing samples step and semi-supervised step. Our framework can save more informative hard clean samples into the cleanly labeled set. Besides, our framework also promotes the quality of pseudo-labels during the semi-supervised step by suppressing the noise in the current pseudo-labels generating scheme. To further enhance the hard samples, we reweight the samples in the cleanly labeled set during training. We evaluated our method using synthetic datasets based on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, as well as on the real-world datasets WebVision and Clothing1M. The results demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

(2 min) Normative modelling is an emerging method for understanding the heterogeneous biology underlying neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders at the level of the individual participant. Deep learning techniques, specially autoencoders have been implemented as normative models, where patient-level deviations are modelled as the squared difference between the actual and reconstructed input without any uncertainty estimates in the deviations. In this study, we assessed NormVAE, a novel Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based normative modelling approach which calculates subject-level deviation maps quantifying uncertainty in the deviations. First, we train NormVAE on the neuroimaging data of healthy population. Next, we assess the trained model on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients to estimate how each disease patient deviated from the norm and identified the brain regions associated with the deviations. Our experiments demonstrated that the NormVAE-generated patient-level deviation maps exhibit increased sensitivity to the different progression stages of AD and have a better correlation with cognition compared to baseline normative models like Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and a standard VAE, which generates deterministic subject-level deviations without any uncertainty estimates.

(2 min) This work presents CounterNet, a novel end-to-end learning framework which integrates Machine Learning (ML) model training and the generation of corresponding counterfactual (CF) explanations into a single end-to-end pipeline. Counterfactual explanations offer a contrastive case, i.e., they attempt to find the smallest modification to the feature values of an instance that changes the prediction of the ML model on that instance to a predefined output. Prior techniques for generating CF explanations suffer from two major limitations: (i) they generate CF explanations by solving separate time-intensive optimization problems for every single input instance (which slows their running time); and (ii) they are post-hoc methods which are designed for use with proprietary black-box ML models - as a result, their procedure for generating CF explanations is uninformed by the training procedure of the black-box ML model, which leads to misalignment of objectives between model predictions and explanations. These two limitations result in significant shortcomings in the quality of the generated CF explanations. CounterNet, on the other hand, integrates both prediction and explanation in the same framework, which enables the optimization of the CF explanation generation only once together with the predictive model. We adopt a theoretically sound block-wise coordinate descent procedure which helps in effectively training CounterNet's network architecture. Finally, we evaluate CounterNet's performance by conducting extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets. Our results show that CounterNet generates high-quality predictions, and corresponding CF explanations (with well-balanced cost-invalidity trade-offs) for any new input instance significantly faster than existing state-of-the-art baselines.

(2 min) In this paper, we introduce the Hessian-Schatten total variation (HTV) -- a novel seminorm that quantifies the total "rugosity" of multivariate functions. Our motivation for defining HTV is to assess the complexity of supervised-learning schemes. We start by specifying the adequate matrix-valued Banach spaces that are equipped with suitable classes of mixed norms. We then show that the HTV is invariant to rotations, scalings, and translations. Additionally, its minimum value is achieved for linear mappings, which supports the common intuition that linear regression is the least complex learning model. Next, we present closed-form expressions of the HTV for two general classes of functions. The first one is the class of Sobolev functions with a certain degree of regularity, for which we show that the HTV coincides with the Hessian-Schatten seminorm that is sometimes used as a regularizer for image reconstruction. The second one is the class of continuous and piecewise-linear (CPWL) functions. In this case, we show that the HTV reflects the total change in slopes between linear regions that have a common facet. Hence, it can be viewed as a convex relaxation (l1-type) of the number of linear regions (l0-type) of CPWL mappings. Finally, we illustrate the use of our proposed seminorm.

(2 min) We show that a Denoising Diffusion Probabalistic Model (DDPM), a class of score-based generative model, can be used to produce realistic mock images that mimic observations of galaxies. Our method is tested with Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) grz imaging of galaxies from the Photometry and Rotation curve OBservations from Extragalactic Surveys (PROBES) sample and galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Subjectively, the generated galaxies are highly realistic when compared with samples from the real dataset. We quantify the similarity by borrowing from the deep generative learning literature, using the `Fr\'echet Inception Distance' to test for subjective and morphological similarity. We also introduce the `Synthetic Galaxy Distance' metric to compare the emergent physical properties (such as total magnitude, colour and half light radius) of a ground truth parent and synthesised child dataset. We argue that the DDPM approach produces sharper and more realistic images than other generative methods such as Adversarial Networks (with the downside of more costly inference), and could be used to produce large samples of synthetic observations tailored to a specific imaging survey. We demonstrate two potential uses of the DDPM: (1) accurate in-painting of occluded data, such as satellite trails, and (2) domain transfer, where new input images can be processed to mimic the properties of the DDPM training set. Here we `DESI-fy' cartoon images as a proof of concept for domain transfer. Finally, we suggest potential applications for score-based approaches that could motivate further research on this topic within the astronomical community.

(2 min) Power iteration is a fundamental algorithm in data analysis. It extracts the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of a given matrix. Applications include ranking algorithms, recommendation systems, principal component analysis (PCA), among many others. In this paper, we introduce multiplication-avoiding power iteration (MAPI), which replaces the standard $\ell_2$-inner products that appear at the regular power iteration (RPI) with multiplication-free vector products which are Mercer-type kernel operations related with the $\ell_1$ norm. Precisely, for an $n\times n$ matrix, MAPI requires $n$ multiplications, while RPI needs $n^2$ multiplications per iteration. Therefore, MAPI provides a significant reduction of the number of multiplication operations, which are known to be costly in terms of energy consumption. We provide applications of MAPI to PCA-based image reconstruction as well as to graph-based ranking algorithms. When compared to RPI, MAPI not only typically converges much faster, but also provides superior performance.

(2 min) We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic convex risk measures. We employ a time-consistent dynamic programming principle to determine the value of a particular policy, and develop policy gradient update rules that aid in obtaining optimal policies. We further develop an actor-critic style algorithm using neural networks to optimize over policies. Finally, we demonstrate the performance and flexibility of our approach by applying it to three optimization problems: statistical arbitrage trading strategies, obstacle avoidance robot control, and financial hedging.

(2 min) Digital harms are widespread in the mobile ecosystem. As these devices gain ever more prominence in our daily lives, so too increases the potential for malicious attacks against individuals. The last line of defense against a range of digital harms - including digital distraction, political polarisation through hate speech, and children being exposed to damaging material - is the user interface. This work introduces GreaseTerminator to enable researchers to develop, deploy, and test interventions against these harms with end-users. We demonstrate the ease of intervention development and deployment, as well as the broad range of harms potentially covered with GreaseTerminator in five in-depth case studies.

(2 min) Understanding model predictions is critical in healthcare, to facilitate rapid verification of model correctness and to guard against use of models that exploit confounding variables. We introduce the challenging new task of explainable multiple abnormality classification in volumetric medical images, in which a model must indicate the regions used to predict each abnormality. To solve this task, we propose a multiple instance learning convolutional neural network, AxialNet, that allows identification of top slices for each abnormality. Next we incorporate HiResCAM, an attention mechanism, to identify sub-slice regions. We prove that for AxialNet, HiResCAM explanations are guaranteed to reflect the locations the model used, unlike Grad-CAM which sometimes highlights irrelevant locations. Armed with a model that produces faithful explanations, we then aim to improve the model's learning through a novel mask loss that leverages HiResCAM and 3D allowed regions to encourage the model to predict abnormalities based only on the organs in which those abnormalities appear. The 3D allowed regions are obtained automatically through a new approach, PARTITION, that combines location information extracted from radiology reports with organ segmentation maps obtained through morphological image processing. Overall, we propose the first model for explainable multi-abnormality prediction in volumetric medical images, and then use the mask loss to achieve a 33% improvement in organ localization of multiple abnormalities in the RAD-ChestCT data set of 36,316 scans, representing the state of the art. This work advances the clinical applicability of multiple abnormality modeling in chest CT volumes.

(2 min) Learning to quickly control a complex dynamical system (continuous and non-linear) in the presence of disturbances and uncertainties is often desired in many industrial and robotic applications. However, techniques to accomplish this task usually rely on a mathematical system model, which is often insufficient to anticipate the effects of time-varying and interrelated sources of non-linearities. Furthermore, most model-free approaches that have been successful at this task rely on massive interactions with the system (usually in a simulation) and are trained in specialized hardware to fit a highly parameterized controller. In this work, we learn to control one such dynamical system (steering position control of a DC motor) using the sample efficient technique named Neural fitted Q. Using data collected from hardware interactions in the real world, we additionally build a simulator to experiment with a wide range of parameters and learning strategies. Using the parameters found in simulation, we successfully learn an effective control policy in one minute and 53 seconds on a simulation and in 10 minutes and 35 seconds on a physical system.

(2 min) Uncertainty quantification is at the core of the reliability and robustness of machine learning. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework to dissect the uncertainty, especially the epistemic component, in deep learning into procedural variability (from the training procedure) and data variability (from the training data), which is the first such attempt in the literature to our best knowledge. We then propose two approaches to estimate these uncertainties, one based on influence function and one on batching. We demonstrate how our approaches overcome the computational difficulties in applying classical statistical methods. Experimental evaluations on multiple problem settings corroborate our theory and illustrate how our framework and estimation can provide direct guidance on modeling and data collection effort to improve deep learning performance.

(2 min) The knockoff filter, recently developed by Barber and Candes, is an effective procedure to perform variable selection with a controlled false discovery rate (FDR). We propose a private version of the knockoff filter by incorporating Gaussian and Laplace mechanisms, and show that variable selection with controlled FDR can be achieved. Simulations demonstrate that our setting has reasonable statistical power.

(2 min) Motivated by the high-frequency data streams continuously generated, real-time learning is becoming increasingly important. These data streams should be processed sequentially with the property that the data stream may change over time. In this streaming setting, we propose techniques for minimizing convex objectives through unbiased estimates of their gradients, commonly referred to as stochastic approximation problems. Our methods rely on stochastic approximation algorithms because of their applicability and computational advantages. The reasoning includes iterate averaging that guarantees optimal statistical efficiency under classical conditions. Our non-asymptotic analysis shows accelerated convergence by selecting the learning rate according to the expected data streams. We show that the average estimate converges optimally and robustly for any data stream rate. In addition, noise reduction can be achieved by processing the data in a specific pattern, which is advantageous for large-scale machine learning problems. These theoretical results are illustrated for various data streams, showing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

(2 min) This paper considers the problem of matrix-variate logistic regression. It derives the fundamental error threshold on estimating low-rank coefficient matrices in the logistic regression problem by obtaining a lower bound on the minimax risk. The bound depends explicitly on the dimension and distribution of the covariates, the rank and energy of the coefficient matrix, and the number of samples. The resulting bound is proportional to the intrinsic degrees of freedom in the problem, which suggests the sample complexity of the low-rank matrix logistic regression problem can be lower than that for vectorized logistic regression. The proof techniques utilized in this work also set the stage for development of minimax lower bounds for tensor-variate logistic regression problems.

(2 min) While learning the graphical structure of Bayesian networks from observational data is key to describing and helping understand data generating processes in complex applications, the task poses considerable challenges due to its computational complexity. The directed acyclic graph (DAG) representing a Bayesian network model is generally not identifiable from observational data, and a variety of methods exist to estimate its equivalence class instead. Under certain assumptions, the popular PC algorithm can consistently recover the correct equivalence class by testing for conditional independence (CI), starting from marginal independence relationships and progressively expanding the conditioning set. Here, we propose the dual PC algorithm, a novel scheme to carry out the CI tests within the PC algorithm by leveraging the inverse relationship between covariance and precision matrices. Notably, the elements of the precision matrix coincide with partial correlations for Gaussian data. Our algorithm then exploits block matrix inversions on the covariance and precision matrices to simultaneously perform tests on partial correlations of complementary (or dual) conditioning sets. The multiple CI tests of the dual PC algorithm, therefore, proceed by first considering marginal and full-order CI relationships and progressively moving to central-order ones. Simulation studies indicate that the dual PC algorithm outperforms the classical PC algorithm both in terms of run time and in recovering the underlying network structure.

(2 min) Recently, self-supervised learning has attracted great attention, since it only requires unlabeled data for training. Contrastive learning is a popular approach for self-supervised learning and achieves promising empirical performance. However, the theoretical understanding of its generalization ability is still limited. To this end, we define a kind of $(\sigma,\delta)$-measure to mathematically quantify the data augmentation, and then provide an upper bound of the downstream classification error based on the measure. We show that the generalization ability of contrastive self-supervised learning depends on three key factors: alignment of positive samples, divergence of class centers, and concentration of augmented data. The first two factors can be optimized by contrastive algorithms, while the third one is priorly determined by pre-defined data augmentation. With the above theoretical findings, we further study two canonical contrastive losses, InfoNCE and cross-correlation loss, and prove that both of them are able to obtain the embedding space satisfying the aforementioned factors. Finally, we conduct various experiments on the real-world dataset, and show that our theoretical inferences on the relationship between the data augmentation and the generalization of contrastive self-supervised learning agree with the empirical observations.

(2 min) In decentralized machine learning, workers compute model updates on their local data. Because the workers only communicate with few neighbors without central coordination, these updates propagate progressively over the network. This paradigm enables distributed training on networks without all-to-all connectivity, helping to protect data privacy as well as to reduce the communication cost of distributed training in data centers. A key challenge, primarily in decentralized deep learning, remains the handling of differences between the workers' local data distributions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the RelaySum mechanism for information propagation in decentralized learning. RelaySum uses spanning trees to distribute information exactly uniformly across all workers with finite delays depending on the distance between nodes. In contrast, the typical gossip averaging mechanism only distributes data uniformly asymptotically while using the same communication volume per step as RelaySum. We prove that RelaySGD, based on this mechanism, is independent of data heterogeneity and scales to many workers, enabling highly accurate decentralized deep learning on heterogeneous data. Our code is available at this http URL

(2 min) As a seminal tool in self-supervised representation learning, contrastive learning has gained unprecedented attention in recent years. In essence, contrastive learning aims to leverage pairs of positive and negative samples for representation learning, which relates to exploiting neighborhood information in a feature space. By investigating the connection between contrastive learning and neighborhood component analysis (NCA), we provide a novel stochastic nearest neighbor viewpoint of contrastive learning and subsequently propose a series of contrastive losses that outperform the existing ones. Under our proposed framework, we show a new methodology to design integrated contrastive losses that could simultaneously achieve good accuracy and robustness on downstream tasks. With the integrated framework, we achieve up to 6\% improvement on the standard accuracy and 17\% improvement on the robust accuracy.

(2 min) We propose RemixIT, a simple and novel self-supervised training method for speech enhancement. The proposed method is based on a continuously self-training scheme that overcomes limitations from previous studies including assumptions for the in-domain noise distribution and having access to clean target signals. Specifically, a separation teacher model is pre-trained on an out-of-domain dataset and is used to infer estimated target signals for a batch of in-domain mixtures. Next, we bootstrap the mixing process by generating artificial mixtures using permuted estimated clean and noise signals. Finally, the student model is trained using the permuted estimated sources as targets while we periodically update teacher's weights using the latest student model. Our experiments show that RemixIT outperforms several previous state-of-the-art self-supervised methods under multiple speech enhancement tasks. Additionally, RemixIT provides a seamless alternative for semi-supervised and unsupervised domain adaptation for speech enhancement tasks, while being general enough to be applied to any separation task and paired with any separation model.

(2 min) The crux of single-channel speech separation is how to encode the mixture of signals into such a latent embedding space that the signals from different speakers can be precisely separated. Existing methods for speech separation either transform the speech signals into frequency domain to perform separation or seek to learn a separable embedding space by constructing a latent domain based on convolutional filters. While the latter type of methods learning an embedding space achieves substantial improvement for speech separation, we argue that the embedding space defined by only one latent domain does not suffice to provide a thoroughly separable encoding space for speech separation. In this paper, we propose the Stepwise-Refining Speech Separation Network (SRSSN), which follows a coarse-to-fine separation framework. It first learns a 1-order latent domain to define an encoding space and thereby performs a rough separation in the coarse phase. Then the proposed SRSSN learns a new latent domain along each basis function of the existing latent domain to obtain a high-order latent domain in the refining phase, which enables our model to perform a refining separation to achieve a more precise speech separation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our SRSSN by conducting extensive experiments, including speech separation in a clean (noise-free) setting on WSJ0-2/3mix datasets as well as in noisy/reverberant settings on WHAM!/WHAMR! datasets. Furthermore, we also perform experiments of speech recognition on separated speech signals by our model to evaluate the performance of speech separation indirectly.

(2 min) Gaussian process hyperparameter optimization requires linear solves with, and log-determinants of, large kernel matrices. Iterative numerical techniques are becoming popular to scale to larger datasets, relying on the conjugate gradient method (CG) for the linear solves and stochastic trace estimation for the log-determinant. This work introduces new algorithmic and theoretical insights for preconditioning these computations. While preconditioning is well understood in the context of CG, we demonstrate that it can also accelerate convergence and reduce variance of the estimates for the log-determinant and its derivative. We prove general probabilistic error bounds for the preconditioned computation of the log-determinant, log-marginal likelihood and its derivatives. Additionally, we derive specific rates for a range of kernel-preconditioner combinations, showing that up to exponential convergence can be achieved. Our theoretical results enable provably efficient optimization of kernel hyperparameters, which we validate empirically on large-scale benchmark problems. There our approach accelerates training by up to an order of magnitude.

(2 min) Overestimation bias control techniques are used by the majority of high-performing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms. However, most of these techniques rely on pre-defined bias correction policies that are either not flexible enough or require environment-specific tuning of hyperparameters. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach for the automatic selection of bias control hyperparameters. We demonstrate its effectiveness on three algorithms: Truncated Quantile Critics, Weighted Delayed DDPG, and Maxmin Q-learning. The proposed technique eliminates the need for an extensive hyperparameter search. We show that it leads to a significant reduction of the actual number of interactions while preserving the performance.

(2 min) Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often suffer from an exponential sample complexity dependence on the number of agents, a phenomenon known as \emph{the curse of multiagents}. In this paper, we address this challenge by investigating sample-efficient model-free algorithms in \emph{decentralized} MARL, and aim to improve existing algorithms along this line. For learning (coarse) correlated equilibria in general-sum Markov games, we propose \emph{stage-based} V-learning algorithms that significantly simplify the algorithmic design and analysis of recent works, and circumvent a rather complicated no-\emph{weighted}-regret bandit subroutine. For learning Nash equilibria in Markov potential games, we propose an independent policy gradient algorithm with a decentralized momentum-based variance reduction technique. All our algorithms are decentralized in that each agent can make decisions based on only its local information. Neither communication nor centralized coordination is required during learning, leading to a natural generalization to a large number of agents. We also provide numerical simulations to corroborate our theoretical findings.

(2 min) Devices based on arrays of interconnected magnetic nano-rings with emergent magnetization dynamics have recently been proposed for use in reservoir computing applications, but for them to be computationally useful it must be possible to optimise their dynamical responses. Here, we use a phenomenological model to demonstrate that such reservoirs can be optimised for classification tasks by tuning hyperparameters that control the scaling and input rate of data into the system using rotating magnetic fields. We use task-independent metrics to assess the rings' computational capabilities at each set of these hyperparameters and show how these metrics correlate directly to performance in spoken and written digit recognition tasks. We then show that these metrics, and performance in tasks, can be further improved by expanding the reservoir's output to include multiple, concurrent measures of the ring arrays magnetic states.

(2 min) Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we consider the scenario where a model is to be distributed to many users, among which a malicious user attempts to attack another user. The malicious user probes its unique copy of the model to search for adversarial samples, presenting found samples to the victim's model in order to replicate the attack. By distributing different copies of the model to different users, we can mitigate such attacks wherein adversarial samples found on one copy would not work on another copy. We propose a flexible parameter rewriting method that directly modifies the model's parameters. This method does not require training and is able to generate a large number of copies, where each copy induces different sets of adversarial samples. Experimentation studies show that our approach can significantly mitigate the attacks while retaining high accuracy.

(2 min) Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP). There, a reward function is drawn from one of multiple possible reward models at the beginning of every episode, but the identity of the chosen reward model is not revealed to the agent. Hence, the latent state space, for which the dynamics are Markovian, is not given to the agent. We study the problem of learning a near optimal policy for two reward-mixing MDPs. Unlike existing approaches that rely on strong assumptions on the dynamics, we make no assumptions and study the problem in full generality. Indeed, with no further assumptions, even for two switching reward-models, the problem requires several new ideas beyond existing algorithmic and analysis techniques for efficient exploration. We provide the first polynomial-time algorithm that finds an $\epsilon$-optimal policy after exploring $\tilde{O}(poly(H,\epsilon^{-1}) \cdot S^2 A^2)$ episodes, where $H$ is time-horizon and $S, A$ are the number of states and actions respectively. This is the first efficient algorithm that does not require any assumptions in partially observed environments where the observation space is smaller than the latent state space.

(2 min) The dynamics of Deep Linear Networks (DLNs) is dramatically affected by the variance $\sigma^2$ of the parameters at initialization $\theta_0$. For DLNs of width $w$, we show a phase transition w.r.t. the scaling $\gamma$ of the variance $\sigma^2=w^{-\gamma}$ as $w\to\infty$: for large variance ($\gamma1$), $\theta_0$ is close to a saddle point and far from any global minimum. While the first case corresponds to the well-studied NTK regime, the second case is less understood. This motivates the study of the case $\gamma \to +\infty$, where we conjecture a Saddle-to-Saddle dynamics: throughout training, gradient descent visits the neighborhoods of a sequence of saddles, each corresponding to linear maps of increasing rank, until reaching a sparse global minimum. We support this conjecture with a theorem for the dynamics between the first two saddles, as well as some numerical experiments.

(2 min) Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and transfer learning for natural language processing (NLP), few works have systematically studied the effect of scaling up the number of tasks during pre-training. Towards this goal, this paper introduces ExMix (Extreme Mixture): a massive collection of 107 supervised NLP tasks across diverse domains and task-families. Using ExMix, we study the effect of multi-task pre-training at the largest scale to date, and analyze co-training transfer amongst common families of tasks. Through this analysis, we show that manually curating an ideal set of tasks for multi-task pre-training is not straightforward, and that multi-task scaling can vastly improve models on its own. Finally, we propose ExT5: a model pre-trained using a multi-task objective of self-supervised span denoising and supervised ExMix. Via extensive experiments, we show that ExT5 outperforms strong T5 baselines on SuperGLUE, GEM, Rainbow, Closed-Book QA tasks, and several tasks outside of ExMix. ExT5 also significantly improves sample efficiency while pre-training.

(2 min) Motivated by a broad class of mobile intervention problems, we propose and study restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) with network effects. In our model, arms are partially recharging and connected through a graph, so that pulling one arm also improves the state of neighboring arms, significantly extending the previously studied setting of fully recharging bandits with no network effects. In mobile interventions, network effects may arise due to regular population movements (such as commuting between home and work). We show that network effects in RMABs induce strong reward coupling that is not accounted for by existing solution methods. We propose a new solution approach for networked RMABs, exploiting concavity properties which arise under natural assumptions on the structure of intervention effects. We provide sufficient conditions for optimality of our approach in idealized settings and demonstrate that it empirically outperforms state-of-the art baselines in three mobile intervention domains using real-world graphs.

(2 min) We propose a framework using normalizing-flow based models, SELF-Referencing Embedded Strings, and multi-objective optimization that efficiently generates small molecules. With an initial training set of only 100 small molecules, FastFlows generates thousands of chemically valid molecules in seconds. Because of the efficient sampling, substructure filters can be applied as desired to eliminate compounds with unreasonable moieties. Using easily computable and learned metrics for druglikeness, synthetic accessibility, and synthetic complexity, we perform a multi-objective optimization to demonstrate how FastFlows functions in a high-throughput virtual screening context. Our model is significantly simpler and easier to train than autoregressive molecular generative models, and enables fast generation and identification of druglike, synthesizable molecules.

(2 min) In recent years, implicit deep learning has emerged as a method to increase the effective depth of deep neural networks. While their training is memory-efficient, they are still significantly slower to train than their explicit counterparts. In Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs), the training is performed as a bi-level problem, and its computational complexity is partially driven by the iterative inversion of a huge Jacobian matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to tackle this computational bottleneck from which many bi-level problems suffer. The main idea is to use the quasi-Newton matrices from the forward pass to efficiently approximate the inverse Jacobian matrix in the direction needed for the gradient computation. We provide a theorem that motivates using our method with the original forward algorithms. In addition, by modifying these forward algorithms, we further provide theoretical guarantees that our method asymptotically estimates the true implicit gradient. We empirically study this approach and the recent Jacobian-Free method in different settings, ranging from hyperparameter optimization to large Multiscale DEQs (MDEQs) applied to CIFAR and ImageNet. Both methods reduce significantly the computational cost of the backward pass. While SHINE has a clear advantage on hyperparameter optimization problems, both methods attain similar computational performances for larger scale problems such as MDEQs at the cost of a limited performance drop compared to the original models.

(2 min) Offering incentives (e.g., coupons at Amazon, discounts at Uber and video bonuses at Tiktok) to user is a common strategy used by online platforms to increase user engagement and platform revenue. Despite its proven effectiveness, these marketing incentives incur an inevitable cost and might result in a low ROI (Return on Investment) if not used properly. On the other hand, different users respond differently to these incentives, for instance, some users never buy certain products without coupons, while others do anyway. Thus, how to select the right amount of incentives (i.e. treatment) to each user under budget constraints is an important research problem with great practical implications. In this paper, we call such problem as a budget-constrained treatment selection (BTS) problem. The challenge is how to efficiently solve BTS problem on a Large-Scale dataset and achieve improved results over the existing techniques. We propose a novel tree-based treatment selection technique under budget constraints, called Large-Scale Budget-Constrained Causal Forest (LBCF) algorithm, which is also an efficient treatment selection algorithm suitable for modern distributed computing systems. A novel offline evaluation method is also proposed to overcome an intrinsic challenge in assessing solutions' performance for BTS problem in randomized control trials (RCT) data. We deploy our approach in a real-world scenario on a large-scale video platform, where the platform gives away bonuses in order to increase users' campaign engagement duration. The simulation analysis, offline and online experiments all show that our method outperforms various tree-based state-of-the-art baselines. The proposed approach is currently serving over hundreds of millions of users on the platform and achieves one of the most tremendous improvements over these months.

(2 min) Deep models trained through maximum likelihood have achieved state-of-the-art results for survival analysis. Despite this training scheme, practitioners evaluate models under other criteria, such as binary classification losses at a chosen set of time horizons, e.g. Brier score (BS) and Bernoulli log likelihood (BLL). Models trained with maximum likelihood may have poor BS or BLL since maximum likelihood does not directly optimize these criteria. Directly optimizing criteria like BS requires inverse-weighting by the censoring distribution. However, estimating the censoring model under these metrics requires inverse-weighting by the failure distribution. The objective for each model requires the other, but neither are known. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Inverse-Weighted Survival Games. In these games, objectives for each model are built from re-weighted estimates featuring the other model, where the latter is held fixed during training. When the loss is proper, we show that the games always have the true failure and censoring distributions as a stationary point. This means models in the game do not leave the correct distributions once reached. We construct one case where this stationary point is unique. We show that these games optimize BS on simulations and then apply these principles on real world cancer and critically-ill patient data.

(0 min) We introduce vector optimization problems with stochastic bandit feedback, which extends the best arm identification problem to vector-valued rewards. We consider $K$ designs, with multi-dimensional mean reward vectors, which are partially ordered according to a polyhedral ordering cone $C$. This generalizes the concept of Pareto set in multi-objective optimization and allows different sets of preferences of decision-makers to be encoded by $C$. Different than prior work, we define approximations of the Pareto set based on direction-free covering and gap notions. We study the setting where an evaluation of each design yields a noisy observation of the mean reward vector. Under subgaussian noise assumption, we investigate the sample complexity of the na\"ive elimination algorithm in an ($\epsilon,\delta$)-PAC setting, where the goal is to identify an ($\epsilon,\delta$)-PAC Pareto set with the minimum number of design evaluations. In order to characterize the difficulty of learning the Pareto set, we introduce the concept of ordering complexity, i.e., geometric conditions on the deviations of empirical reward vectors from their mean under which the Pareto front can be approximated accurately. We show how to compute the ordering complexity of any polyhedral ordering cone. We run experiments to verify our theoretical results and illustrate how $C$ and sampling budget affect the Pareto set, returned ($\epsilon,\delta$)-PAC Pareto set and the success of identification.

(0 min) Motivated by the high-frequency data streams continuously generated, real-time learning is becoming increasingly important. These data streams should be processed sequentially with the property that the data stream may change over time. In this streaming setting, we propose techniques for minimizing convex objectives through unbiased estimates of their gradients, commonly referred to as stochastic approximation problems. Our methods rely on stochastic approximation algorithms because of their applicability and computational advantages. The reasoning includes iterate averaging that guarantees optimal statistical efficiency under classical conditions. Our non-asymptotic analysis shows accelerated convergence by selecting the learning rate according to the expected data streams. We show that the average estimate converges optimally and robustly for any data stream rate. In addition, noise reduction can be achieved by processing the data in a specific pattern, which is advantageous for large-scale machine learning problems. These theoretical results are illustrated for various data streams, showing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

(0 min) Recently, self-supervised learning has attracted great attention, since it only requires unlabeled data for training. Contrastive learning is a popular approach for self-supervised learning and achieves promising empirical performance. However, the theoretical understanding of its generalization ability is still limited. To this end, we define a kind of $(\sigma,\delta)$-measure to mathematically quantify the data augmentation, and then provide an upper bound of the downstream classification error based on the measure. We show that the generalization ability of contrastive self-supervised learning depends on three key factors: alignment of positive samples, divergence of class centers, and concentration of augmented data. The first two factors can be optimized by contrastive algorithms, while the third one is priorly determined by pre-defined data augmentation. With the above theoretical findings, we further study two canonical contrastive losses, InfoNCE and cross-correlation loss, and prove that both of them are able to obtain the embedding space satisfying the aforementioned factors. Finally, we conduct various experiments on the real-world dataset, and show that our theoretical inferences on the relationship between the data augmentation and the generalization of contrastive self-supervised learning agree with the empirical observations.

(0 min) Deep models trained through maximum likelihood have achieved state-of-the-art results for survival analysis. Despite this training scheme, practitioners evaluate models under other criteria, such as binary classification losses at a chosen set of time horizons, e.g. Brier score (BS) and Bernoulli log likelihood (BLL). Models trained with maximum likelihood may have poor BS or BLL since maximum likelihood does not directly optimize these criteria. Directly optimizing criteria like BS requires inverse-weighting by the censoring distribution. However, estimating the censoring model under these metrics requires inverse-weighting by the failure distribution. The objective for each model requires the other, but neither are known. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Inverse-Weighted Survival Games. In these games, objectives for each model are built from re-weighted estimates featuring the other model, where the latter is held fixed during training. When the loss is proper, we show that the games always have the true failure and censoring distributions as a stationary point. This means models in the game do not leave the correct distributions once reached. We construct one case where this stationary point is unique. We show that these games optimize BS on simulations and then apply these principles on real world cancer and critically-ill patient data.

(0 min) We are interested in privatizing an approximate posterior inference algorithm called Expectation Propagation (EP). EP approximates the posterior by iteratively refining approximations to the local likelihoods, and is known to provide better posterior uncertainties than those by variational inference (VI). However, EP needs a large memory to maintain all local approximates associated with each datapoint in the training data. To overcome this challenge, stochastic expectation propagation (SEP) considers a single unique local factor that captures the average effect of each likelihood term to the posterior and refines it in a way analogous to EP. In terms of privacy, SEP is more tractable than EP because at each refining step of a factor, the remaining factors are fixed and do not depend on other datapoints as in EP, which makes the sensitivity analysis straightforward. We provide a theoretical analysis of the privacy-accuracy trade-off in the posterior estimates under our method, called differentially private stochastic expectation propagation (DP-SEP). Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of our DP-SEP algorithm evaluated on both synthetic and real-world datasets in terms of the quality of posterior estimates at different levels of guaranteed privacy.

(0 min) A well-studied challenge that arises in the structure learning problem of causal directed acyclic graphs (DAG) is that using observational data, one can only learn the graph up to a "Markov equivalence class" (MEC). The remaining undirected edges have to be oriented using interventions, which can be very expensive to perform in applications. Thus, the problem of minimizing the number of interventions needed to fully orient the MEC has received a lot of recent attention, and is also the focus of this work. We prove two main results. The first is a new universal lower bound on the number of atomic interventions that any algorithm (whether active or passive) would need to perform in order to orient a given MEC. Our second result shows that this bound is, in fact, within a factor of two of the size of the smallest set of atomic interventions that can orient the MEC. Our lower bound is provably better than previously known lower bounds. The proof of our lower bound is based on the new notion of clique-block shared-parents (CBSP) orderings, which are topological orderings of DAGs without v-structures and satisfy certain special properties. Further, using simulations on synthetic graphs and by giving examples of special graph families, we show that our bound is often significantly better.

(0 min) Selective regression allows abstention from prediction if the confidence to make an accurate prediction is not sufficient. In general, by allowing a reject option, one expects the performance of a regression model to increase at the cost of reducing coverage (i.e., by predicting on fewer samples). However, as we show, in some cases, the performance of a minority subgroup can decrease while we reduce the coverage, and thus selective regression can magnify disparities between different sensitive subgroups. Motivated by these disparities, we propose new fairness criteria for selective regression requiring the performance of every subgroup to improve with a decrease in coverage. We prove that if a feature representation satisfies the sufficiency criterion or is calibrated for mean and variance, than the proposed fairness criteria is met. Further, we introduce two approaches to mitigate the performance disparity across subgroups: (a) by regularizing an upper bound of conditional mutual information under a Gaussian assumption and (b) by regularizing a contrastive loss for conditional mean and conditional variance prediction. The effectiveness of these approaches is demonstrated on synthetic and real-world datasets.

(0 min) Message-passing algorithms based on the Belief Propagation (BP) equations constitute a well-known distributed computational scheme. It is exact on tree-like graphical models and has also proven to be effective in many problems defined on graphs with loops (from inference to optimization, from signal processing to clustering). The BP-based scheme is fundamentally different from stochastic gradient descent (SGD), on which the current success of deep networks is based. In this paper, we present and adapt to mini-batch training on GPUs a family of BP-based message-passing algorithms with a reinforcement field that biases distributions towards locally entropic solutions. These algorithms are capable of training multi-layer neural networks with discrete weights and activations with performance comparable to SGD-inspired heuristics (BinaryNet) and are naturally well-adapted to continual learning. Furthermore, using these algorithms to estimate the marginals of the weights allows us to make approximate Bayesian predictions that have higher accuracy than point-wise solutions.

(0 min) In online learning problems, exploiting low variance plays an important role in obtaining tight performance guarantees yet is challenging because variances are often not known a priori. Recently, considerable progress has been made by Zhang et al. (2021) where they obtain a variance-adaptive regret bound for linear bandits without knowledge of the variances and a horizon-free regret bound for linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this paper, we present novel analyses that improve their regret bounds significantly. For linear bandits, we achieve $\tilde O(d^{1.5}\sqrt{\sum_{k}^K \sigma_k^2} + d^2)$ where $d$ is the dimension of the features, $K$ is the time horizon, and $\sigma_k^2$ is the noise variance at time step $k$, and $\tilde O$ ignores polylogarithmic dependence, which is a factor of $d^3$ improvement. For linear mixture MDPs with the assumption of maximum cumulative reward in an episode being in $[0,1]$, we achieve a horizon-free regret bound of $\tilde O(d \sqrt{K} + d^2)$ where $d$ is the number of base models and $K$ is the number of episodes. This is a factor of $d^{3.5}$ improvement in the leading term and $d^7$ in the lower order term. Our analysis critically relies on a novel elliptical potential `count' lemma. This lemma allows a novel regret analysis in conjunction with the peeling trick, which is of independent interest.

(0 min) In this paper, we introduce the Hessian-Schatten total variation (HTV) -- a novel seminorm that quantifies the total "rugosity" of multivariate functions. Our motivation for defining HTV is to assess the complexity of supervised-learning schemes. We start by specifying the adequate matrix-valued Banach spaces that are equipped with suitable classes of mixed norms. We then show that the HTV is invariant to rotations, scalings, and translations. Additionally, its minimum value is achieved for linear mappings, which supports the common intuition that linear regression is the least complex learning model. Next, we present closed-form expressions of the HTV for two general classes of functions. The first one is the class of Sobolev functions with a certain degree of regularity, for which we show that the HTV coincides with the Hessian-Schatten seminorm that is sometimes used as a regularizer for image reconstruction. The second one is the class of continuous and piecewise-linear (CPWL) functions. In this case, we show that the HTV reflects the total change in slopes between linear regions that have a common facet. Hence, it can be viewed as a convex relaxation (l1-type) of the number of linear regions (l0-type) of CPWL mappings. Finally, we illustrate the use of our proposed seminorm.

(0 min) Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used in various domains due to their impressive capabilities. These models are typically composed of a large number of 2D convolutional (Conv2D) layers with numerous trainable parameters. To reduce the complexity of a network, compression techniques can be applied. These methods typically rely on the analysis of trained deep learning models. However, in some applications, due to reasons such as particular data or system specifications and licensing restrictions, a pre-trained network may not be available. This would require the user to train a CNN from scratch. In this paper, we aim to find an alternative parameterization to Conv2D filters without relying on a pre-trained convolutional network. During the analysis, we observe that the effective rank of the vectorized Conv2D filters decreases with respect to the increasing depth in the network, which then leads to the implementation of the Depthwise Convolutional Eigen-Filter (DeCEF) layer. Essentially, a DeCEF layer is a low rank version of the Conv2D layer with significantly fewer trainable parameters and floating point operations (FLOPs). The way we define the effective rank is different from the previous work and it is easy to implement in any deep learning frameworks. To evaluate the effectiveness of DeCEF, experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets CIFAR-10 and ImageNet using various network architectures. The results have shown a similar or higher accuracy and robustness using about 2/3 of the original parameters and reducing the number of FLOPs to 2/3 of the base network, which is then compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.

(0 min) In deep learning with differential privacy (DP), the neural network achieves the privacy usually at the cost of slower convergence (and thus lower performance) than its non-private counterpart. This work gives the first convergence analysis of the DP deep learning, through the lens of training dynamics and the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Our convergence theory successfully characterizes the effects of two key components in the DP training: the per-sample clipping and the noise addition. Our analysis not only initiates a general principled framework to understand the DP deep learning with any network architecture and loss function, but also motivates a new clipping method -- the global clipping, that significantly improves the convergence, as well as preserves the same DP guarantee and computational efficiency as the existing method, which we term as local clipping. Theoretically speaking, we precisely characterize the effect of per-sample clipping on the NTK matrix and show that the noise level of DP optimizers does not affect the convergence in the gradient flow regime. In particular, the local clipping almost certainly breaks the positive semi-definiteness of NTK, which can be preserved by our global clipping. Consequently, DP gradient descent (GD) with global clipping converge monotonically to zero loss, which is often violated by the existing DP-GD. Notably, our analysis framework easily extends to other optimizers, e.g., DP-Adam. We demonstrate through numerous experiments that DP optimizers equipped with global clipping perform strongly on classification and regression tasks. In addition, our global clipping is surprisingly effective at learning calibrated classifiers, in contrast to the existing DP classifiers which are oftentimes over-confident and unreliable. Implementation-wise, the new clipping can be realized by inserting one line of code into the Pytorch Opacus library.

(0 min) It is well known that machine learning methods can be vulnerable to adversarially-chosen perturbations of their inputs. Despite significant progress in the area, foundational open problems remain. In this paper, we address several key questions. We derive exact and approximate Bayes-optimal robust classifiers for the important setting of two- and three-class Gaussian classification problems with arbitrary imbalance, for $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ adversaries. In contrast to classical Bayes-optimal classifiers, determining the optimal decisions here cannot be made pointwise and new theoretical approaches are needed. We develop and leverage new tools, including recent breakthroughs from probability theory on robust isoperimetry, which, to our knowledge, have not yet been used in the area. Our results reveal fundamental tradeoffs between standard and robust accuracy that grow when data is imbalanced. We also show further results, including an analysis of classification calibration for convex losses in certain models, and finite sample rates for the robust risk.

(0 min) We present the Local Self-Balancing sampler (LSB), a local Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling in purely discrete domains, which is able to autonomously adapt to the target distribution and to reduce the number of target evaluations required to converge. LSB is based on (i) a parametrization of locally balanced proposals, (ii) an objective function based on mutual information and (iii) a self-balancing learning procedure, which minimises the proposed objective to update the proposal parameters. Experiments on energy-based models and Bayesian networks show that LSB converges using a smaller number of queries to the oracle distribution compared to recent local MCMC samplers.

(0 min) The knockoff filter, recently developed by Barber and Candes, is an effective procedure to perform variable selection with a controlled false discovery rate (FDR). We propose a private version of the knockoff filter by incorporating Gaussian and Laplace mechanisms, and show that variable selection with controlled FDR can be achieved. Simulations demonstrate that our setting has reasonable statistical power.

(0 min) We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we prove that $T$ iterations of SGD with exponentially decreasing step-sizes and knowledge of the smoothness can achieve an $\tilde{O} \left(\exp \left( \frac{-T}{\kappa} \right) + \frac{\sigma^2}{T} \right)$ rate, without knowing $\sigma^2$. In order to be adaptive to the smoothness, we use a stochastic line-search (SLS) and show (via upper and lower-bounds) that SGD with SLS converges at the desired rate, but only to a neighbourhood of the solution. On the other hand, we prove that SGD with an offline estimate of the smoothness converges to the minimizer. However, its rate is slowed down proportional to the estimation error. Next, we prove that SGD with Nesterov acceleration and exponential step-sizes (referred to as ASGD) can achieve the near-optimal $\tilde{O} \left(\exp \left( \frac{-T}{\sqrt{\kappa}} \right) + \frac{\sigma^2}{T} \right)$ rate, without knowledge of $\sigma^2$. When used with offline estimates of the smoothness and strong-convexity, ASGD still converges to the solution, albeit at a slower rate. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of exponential step-sizes coupled with a novel variant of SLS.

(0 min) A few-shot generative model should be able to generate data from a distribution by only observing a limited set of examples. In few-shot learning the model is trained on data from many sets from different distributions sharing some underlying properties such as sets of characters from different alphabets or sets of images of different type objects. We extend current latent variable models for sets to a fully hierarchical approach with an attention-based point to set-level aggregation and call our approach SCHA-VAE for Set-Context-Hierarchical-Aggregation Variational Autoencoder. We explore iterative data sampling, likelihood-based model comparison, and adaptation-free out of distribution generalization. Our results show that the hierarchical formulation better captures the intrinsic variability within the sets in the small data regime. With this work we generalize deep latent variable approaches to few-shot learning, taking a step towards large-scale few-shot generation with a formulation that readily can work with current state-of-the-art deep generative models.

(0 min) Uncertainty quantification is at the core of the reliability and robustness of machine learning. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework to dissect the uncertainty, especially the epistemic component, in deep learning into procedural variability (from the training procedure) and data variability (from the training data), which is the first such attempt in the literature to our best knowledge. We then propose two approaches to estimate these uncertainties, one based on influence function and one on batching. We demonstrate how our approaches overcome the computational difficulties in applying classical statistical methods. Experimental evaluations on multiple problem settings corroborate our theory and illustrate how our framework and estimation can provide direct guidance on modeling and data collection effort to improve deep learning performance.

(0 min) Second-order optimization methods are among the most widely used optimization approaches for convex optimization problems, and have recently been used to optimize non-convex optimization problems such as deep learning models. The widely used second-order optimization methods such as quasi-Newton methods generally provide curvature information by approximating the Hessian using the secant equation. However, the secant equation becomes insipid in approximating the Newton step owing to its use of the first-order derivatives. In this study, we propose an approximate Newton sketch-based stochastic optimization algorithm for large-scale empirical risk minimization. Specifically, we compute a partial column Hessian of size ($d\times m$) with $m\ll d$ randomly selected variables, then use the \emph{Nystr\"om method} to better approximate the full Hessian matrix. To further reduce the computational complexity per iteration, we directly compute the update step ($\Delta\boldsymbol{w}$) without computing and storing the full Hessian or its inverse. We then integrate our approximated Hessian with stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods. The results of numerical experiments on both convex and non-convex functions show that the proposed approach was able to obtain a better approximation of Newton\textquotesingle s method, exhibiting performance competitive with that of state-of-the-art first-order and stochastic quasi-Newton methods. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical convergence analysis for convex functions.

(0 min) Automated design synthesis has the potential to revolutionize the modern engineering design process and improve access to highly optimized and customized products across countless industries. Successfully adapting generative Machine Learning to design engineering may enable such automated design synthesis and is a research subject of great importance. We present a review and analysis of Deep Generative Machine Learning models in engineering design. Deep Generative Models (DGMs) typically leverage deep networks to learn from an input dataset and synthesize new designs. Recently, DGMs such as feedforward Neural Networks (NNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and certain Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) frameworks have shown promising results in design applications like structural optimization, materials design, and shape synthesis. The prevalence of DGMs in engineering design has skyrocketed since 2016. Anticipating continued growth, we conduct a review of recent advances to benefit researchers interested in DGMs for design. We structure our review as an exposition of the algorithms, datasets, representation methods, and applications commonly used in the current literature. In particular, we discuss key works that have introduced new techniques and methods in DGMs, successfully applied DGMs to a design-related domain, or directly supported the development of DGMs through datasets or auxiliary methods. We further identify key challenges and limitations currently seen in DGMs across design fields, such as design creativity, handling constraints and objectives, and modeling both form and functional performance simultaneously. In our discussion, we identify possible solution pathways as key areas on which to target future work.

(0 min) In recent years, Quantum Computing witnessed massive improvements in terms of available resources and algorithms development. The ability to harness quantum phenomena to solve computational problems is a long-standing dream that has drawn the scientific community's interest since the late 80s. In such a context, we propose our contribution. First, we introduce basic concepts related to quantum computations, and then we explain the core functionalities of technologies that implement the Gate Model and Adiabatic Quantum Computing paradigms. Finally, we gather, compare and analyze the current state-of-the-art concerning Quantum Perceptrons and Quantum Neural Networks implementations.

(0 min) Unsupervised skill learning objectives (Gregor et al., 2016, Eysenbach et al., 2018) allow agents to learn rich repertoires of behavior in the absence of extrinsic rewards. They work by simultaneously training a policy to produce distinguishable latent-conditioned trajectories, and a discriminator to evaluate distinguishability by trying to infer latents from trajectories. The hope is for the agent to explore and master the environment by encouraging each skill (latent) to reliably reach different states. However, an inherent exploration problem lingers: when a novel state is actually encountered, the discriminator will necessarily not have seen enough training data to produce accurate and confident skill classifications, leading to low intrinsic reward for the agent and effective penalization of the sort of exploration needed to actually maximize the objective. To combat this inherent pessimism towards exploration, we derive an information gain auxiliary objective that involves training an ensemble of discriminators and rewarding the policy for their disagreement. Our objective directly estimates the epistemic uncertainty that comes from the discriminator not having seen enough training examples, thus providing an intrinsic reward more tailored to the true objective compared to pseudocount-based methods (Burda et al., 2019). We call this exploration bonus discriminator disagreement intrinsic reward, or DISDAIN. We demonstrate empirically that DISDAIN improves skill learning both in a tabular grid world (Four Rooms) and the 57 games of the Atari Suite (from pixels). Thus, we encourage researchers to treat pessimism with DISDAIN.

(0 min) We propose a new class of random feature methods for linearizing softmax and Gaussian kernels called hybrid random features (HRFs) that automatically adapt the quality of kernel estimation to provide most accurate approximation in the defined regions of interest. Special instantiations of HRFs lead to well-known methods such as trigonometric (Rahimi and Recht, 2007) or (recently introduced in the context of linear-attention Transformers) positive random features (Choromanski et al., 2021). By generalizing Bochner's Theorem for softmax/Gaussian kernels and leveraging random features for compositional kernels, the HRF-mechanism provides strong theoretical guarantees - unbiased approximation and strictly smaller worst-case relative errors than its counterparts. We conduct exhaustive empirical evaluation of HRF ranging from pointwise kernel estimation experiments, through tests on data admitting clustering structure to benchmarking implicit-attention Transformers (also for downstream Robotics applications), demonstrating its quality in a wide spectrum of machine learning problems.

(0 min) Overestimation bias control techniques are used by the majority of high-performing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms. However, most of these techniques rely on pre-defined bias correction policies that are either not flexible enough or require environment-specific tuning of hyperparameters. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach for the automatic selection of bias control hyperparameters. We demonstrate its effectiveness on three algorithms: Truncated Quantile Critics, Weighted Delayed DDPG, and Maxmin Q-learning. The proposed technique eliminates the need for an extensive hyperparameter search. We show that it leads to a significant reduction of the actual number of interactions while preserving the performance.

(0 min) Dictionary learning consists of finding a sparse representation from noisy data and is a common way to encode data-driven prior knowledge on signals. Alternating minimization (AM) is standard for the underlying optimization, where gradient descent steps alternate with sparse coding procedures. The major drawback of this method is its prohibitive computational cost, making it unpractical on large real-world data sets. This work studies an approximate formulation of dictionary learning based on unrolling and compares it to alternating minimization to find the best trade-off between speed and precision. We analyze the asymptotic behavior and convergence rate of gradients estimates in both methods. We show that unrolling performs better on the support of the inner problem solution and during the first iterations. Finally, we apply unrolling on pattern learning in magnetoencephalography (MEG) with the help of a stochastic algorithm and compare the performance to a state-of-the-art method.

(0 min) Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited in their expressive power, struggle with long-range interactions and lack a principled way to model higher-order structures. These problems can be attributed to the strong coupling between the computational graph and the input graph structure. The recently proposed Message Passing Simplicial Networks naturally decouple these elements by performing message passing on the clique complex of the graph. Nevertheless, these models can be severely constrained by the rigid combinatorial structure of Simplicial Complexes (SCs). In this work, we extend recent theoretical results on SCs to regular Cell Complexes, topological objects that flexibly subsume SCs and graphs. We show that this generalisation provides a powerful set of graph "lifting" transformations, each leading to a unique hierarchical message passing procedure. The resulting methods, which we collectively call CW Networks (CWNs), are strictly more powerful than the WL test and not less powerful than the 3-WL test. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of one such scheme, based on rings, when applied to molecular graph problems. The proposed architecture benefits from provably larger expressivity than commonly used GNNs, principled modelling of higher-order signals and from compressing the distances between nodes. We demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of molecular datasets.

(0 min) The dynamics of Deep Linear Networks (DLNs) is dramatically affected by the variance $\sigma^2$ of the parameters at initialization $\theta_0$. For DLNs of width $w$, we show a phase transition w.r.t. the scaling $\gamma$ of the variance $\sigma^2=w^{-\gamma}$ as $w\to\infty$: for large variance ($\gamma1$), $\theta_0$ is close to a saddle point and far from any global minimum. While the first case corresponds to the well-studied NTK regime, the second case is less understood. This motivates the study of the case $\gamma \to +\infty$, where we conjecture a Saddle-to-Saddle dynamics: throughout training, gradient descent visits the neighborhoods of a sequence of saddles, each corresponding to linear maps of increasing rank, until reaching a sparse global minimum. We support this conjecture with a theorem for the dynamics between the first two saddles, as well as some numerical experiments.

(0 min) This paper studies offline Imitation Learning (IL) where an agent learns to imitate an expert demonstrator without additional online environment interactions. Instead, the learner is presented with a static offline dataset of state-action-next state transition triples from a potentially less proficient behavior policy. We introduce Model-based IL from Offline data (MILO): an algorithmic framework that utilizes the static dataset to solve the offline IL problem efficiently both in theory and in practice. In theory, even if the behavior policy is highly sub-optimal compared to the expert, we show that as long as the data from the behavior policy provides sufficient coverage on the expert state-action traces (and with no necessity for a global coverage over the entire state-action space), MILO can provably combat the covariate shift issue in IL. Complementing our theory results, we also demonstrate that a practical implementation of our approach mitigates covariate shift on benchmark MuJoCo continuous control tasks. We demonstrate that with behavior policies whose performances are less than half of that of the expert, MILO still successfully imitates with an extremely low number of expert state-action pairs while traditional offline IL method such as behavior cloning (BC) fails completely. Source code is provided at https://github.com/jdchang1/milo.

(0 min) Creating labeled training sets has become one of the major roadblocks in machine learning. To address this, recent Weak Supervision (WS) frameworks synthesize training labels from multiple potentially noisy supervision sources. However, existing frameworks are restricted to supervision sources that share the same output space as the target task. To extend the scope of usable sources, we formulate Weak Indirect Supervision (WIS), a new research problem for automatically synthesizing training labels based on indirect supervision sources that have different output label spaces. To overcome the challenge of mismatched output spaces, we develop a probabilistic modeling approach, PLRM, which uses user-provided label relations to model and leverage indirect supervision sources. Moreover, we provide a theoretically-principled test of the distinguishability of PLRM for unseen labels, along with a generalization bound. On both image and text classification tasks as well as an industrial advertising application, we demonstrate the advantages of PLRM by outperforming baselines by a margin of 2%-9%.

(0 min) Second-order methods have the capability of accelerating optimization by using much richer curvature information than first-order methods. However, most are impractical for deep learning, where the number of training parameters is huge. In Goldfarb et al. (2020), practical quasi-Newton methods were proposed that approximate the Hessian of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model by a layer-wise block diagonal matrix where each layer's block is further approximated by a Kronecker product corresponding to the structure of the Hessian restricted to that layer. Here, we extend these methods to enable them to be applied to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), by analyzing the Kronecker-factored structure of the Hessian matrix of convolutional layers. Several improvements to the methods in Goldfarb et al. (2020) are also proposed that can be applied to both MLPs and CNNs. These new methods have memory requirements comparable to first-order methods and much less per-iteration time complexity than those in Goldfarb et al. (2020). Moreover, convergence results are proved for a variant under relatively mild conditions. Finally, we compared the performance of our new methods against several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on MLP autoencoder and CNN problems, and found that they outperformed the first-order SOTA methods and performed comparably to the second-order SOTA methods.

(0 min) In decentralized machine learning, workers compute model updates on their local data. Because the workers only communicate with few neighbors without central coordination, these updates propagate progressively over the network. This paradigm enables distributed training on networks without all-to-all connectivity, helping to protect data privacy as well as to reduce the communication cost of distributed training in data centers. A key challenge, primarily in decentralized deep learning, remains the handling of differences between the workers' local data distributions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the RelaySum mechanism for information propagation in decentralized learning. RelaySum uses spanning trees to distribute information exactly uniformly across all workers with finite delays depending on the distance between nodes. In contrast, the typical gossip averaging mechanism only distributes data uniformly asymptotically while using the same communication volume per step as RelaySum. We prove that RelaySGD, based on this mechanism, is independent of data heterogeneity and scales to many workers, enabling highly accurate decentralized deep learning on heterogeneous data. Our code is available at this http URL

(0 min) The successful application of machine learning (ML) methods becomes increasingly dependent on their interpretability or explainability. Designing explainable ML systems is instrumental to ensuring transparency of automated decision-making that targets humans. The explainability of ML methods is also an essential ingredient for trustworthy artificial intelligence. A key challenge in ensuring explainability is its dependence on the specific human user ("explainee"). The users of machine learning methods might have vastly different background knowledge about machine learning principles. One user might have a university degree in machine learning or related fields, while another user might have never received formal training in high-school mathematics. This paper applies information-theoretic concepts to develop a novel measure for the subjective explainability of the predictions delivered by a ML method. We construct this measure via the conditional entropy of predictions, given a user signal. This user signal might be obtained from user surveys or biophysical measurements. Our main contribution is the explainable empirical risk minimization (EERM) principle of learning a hypothesis that optimally balances between the subjective explainability and risk. The EERM principle is flexible and can be combined with arbitrary machine learning models. We present several practical implementations of EERM for linear models and decision trees. Numerical experiments demonstrate the application of EERM to detecting the use of inappropriate language on social media.

(0 min) In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework for semi-discrete optimization using ideas from optimal transport. Our primary motivation is in the field of deep learning, and specifically in the task of neural architecture search. With this aim in mind, we discuss the geometric and theoretical motivation for new techniques for neural architecture search (in a companion paper we show that algorithms inspired by our framework are competitive with contemporaneous methods). We introduce a Riemannian-like metric on the space of probability measures over a semi-discrete space $\mathbb{R}^d \times \mathcal{G}$ where $\mathcal{G}$ is a finite weighted graph. With such Riemmanian structure in hand, we derive formal expressions for the gradient flow of a relative entropy functional, as well as second order dynamics for the optimization of said energy. Then, with the aim of providing a rigorous motivation for the gradient flow equations derived formally, we also consider an iterative procedure known as minimizing movement scheme (i.e., Implicit Euler scheme, or JKO scheme) and apply it to the relative entropy with respect to a suitable cost function. For some specific choices of metric and cost, we rigorously show that the minimizing movement scheme of the relative entropy functional converges to the gradient flow process provided by the formal Riemannian structure. This flow coincides with a system of reaction-diffusion equations on $\mathbb{R}^d$.

(0 min) Kernel mean embedding is a useful tool to represent and compare probability measures. Despite its usefulness, kernel mean embedding considers infinite-dimensional features, which are challenging to handle in the context of differentially private data generation. A recent work proposes to approximate the kernel mean embedding of data distribution using finite-dimensional random features, which yields analytically tractable sensitivity. However, the number of required random features is excessively high, often ten thousand to a hundred thousand, which worsens the privacy-accuracy trade-off. To improve the trade-off, we propose to replace random features with Hermite polynomial features. Unlike the random features, the Hermite polynomial features are ordered, where the features at the low orders contain more information on the distribution than those at the high orders. Hence, a relatively low order of Hermite polynomial features can more accurately approximate the mean embedding of the data distribution compared to a significantly higher number of random features. As demonstrated on several tabular and image datasets, the use of Hermite polynomial features is better suited for private data generation than the use of random features.

(0 min) In recent years, implicit deep learning has emerged as a method to increase the effective depth of deep neural networks. While their training is memory-efficient, they are still significantly slower to train than their explicit counterparts. In Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs), the training is performed as a bi-level problem, and its computational complexity is partially driven by the iterative inversion of a huge Jacobian matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to tackle this computational bottleneck from which many bi-level problems suffer. The main idea is to use the quasi-Newton matrices from the forward pass to efficiently approximate the inverse Jacobian matrix in the direction needed for the gradient computation. We provide a theorem that motivates using our method with the original forward algorithms. In addition, by modifying these forward algorithms, we further provide theoretical guarantees that our method asymptotically estimates the true implicit gradient. We empirically study this approach and the recent Jacobian-Free method in different settings, ranging from hyperparameter optimization to large Multiscale DEQs (MDEQs) applied to CIFAR and ImageNet. Both methods reduce significantly the computational cost of the backward pass. While SHINE has a clear advantage on hyperparameter optimization problems, both methods attain similar computational performances for larger scale problems such as MDEQs at the cost of a limited performance drop compared to the original models.

(0 min) In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features only. We present Thresholded Lasso bandit, an algorithm that (i) estimates the vector defining the reward function as well as its sparse support, i.e., significant feature elements, using the Lasso framework with thresholding, and (ii) selects an arm greedily according to this estimate projected on its support. The algorithm does not require prior knowledge of the sparsity index $s_0$ and can be parameter-free. For this simple algorithm, we establish non-asymptotic regret upper bounds scaling as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \sqrt{T} )$ in general, and as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \log T)$ under the so-called margin condition (a probabilistic condition on the separation of the arm rewards). The regret of previous algorithms scales as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \sqrt{T \log (d T)})$ and $\mathcal{O}( \log T \log d)$ in the two settings, respectively. Through numerical experiments, we confirm that our algorithm outperforms existing methods.

(0 min) Node clustering is a powerful tool in the analysis of networks. We introduce a graph neural network framework to obtain node embeddings for directed networks in a self-supervised manner, including a novel probabilistic imbalance loss, which can be used for network clustering. Here, we propose directed flow imbalance measures, which are tightly related to directionality, to reveal clusters in the network even when there is no density difference between clusters. In contrast to standard approaches in the literature, in this paper, directionality is not treated as a nuisance, but rather contains the main signal. DIGRAC optimizes directed flow imbalance for clustering without requiring label supervision, unlike existing GNN methods, and can naturally incorporate node features, unlike existing spectral methods. Experimental results on synthetic data, in the form of directed stochastic block models, and real-world data at different scales, demonstrate that our method, based on flow imbalance, attains state-of-the-art results on directed graph clustering when compared against 10 methods from the literature, for a wide range of noise and sparsity levels and graph structures and topologies, and even outperforms supervised methods.

(0 min) We extend the definition of the marginal causal effect to the continuous treatment setting and develop a novel characterization of causal bias in the framework of structural causal models. We prove that our derived bias expression is zero if, and only if, the causal effect is identifiable via covariate adjustment. We show that under some restrictions on the structural equations, the causal bias can be estimated efficiently and allows for causal regularization of predictive probabilistic models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for causal bias quantification in various settings where (not) controlling for certain covariates would introduce causal bias.

(0 min) Bilevel optimization has recently attracted growing interests due to its wide applications in modern machine learning problems. Although recent studies have characterized the convergence rate for several such popular algorithms, it is still unclear how much further these convergence rates can be improved. In this paper, we address this fundamental question from two perspectives. First, we provide the first-known lower complexity bounds of $\widetilde{\Omega}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\mu_x}\mu_y})$ and $\widetilde \Omega\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\epsilon}}\min\{\frac{1}{\mu_y},\frac{1}{\sqrt{\epsilon^{3}}}\}\big)$ respectively for strongly-convex-strongly-convex and convex-strongly-convex bilevel optimizations. Second, we propose an accelerated bilevel optimizer named AccBiO, for which we provide the first-known complexity bounds without the gradient boundedness assumption (which was made in existing analyses) under the two aforementioned geometries. We also provide significantly tighter upper bounds than the existing complexity when the bounded gradient assumption does hold. We show that AccBiO achieves the optimal results (i.e., the upper and lower bounds match up to logarithmic factors) when the inner-level problem takes a quadratic form with a constant-level condition number. Interestingly, our lower bounds under both geometries are larger than the corresponding optimal complexities of minimax optimization, establishing that bilevel optimization is provably more challenging than minimax optimization.

(0 min) We perform scalable approximate inference in continuous-depth Bayesian neural networks. In this model class, uncertainty about separate weights in each layer gives hidden units that follow a stochastic differential equation. We demonstrate gradient-based stochastic variational inference in this infinite-parameter setting, producing arbitrarily-flexible approximate posteriors. We also derive a novel gradient estimator that approaches zero variance as the approximate posterior over weights approaches the true posterior. This approach brings continuous-depth Bayesian neural nets to a competitive comparison against discrete-depth alternatives, while inheriting the memory-efficient training and tunable precision of Neural ODEs.

(0 min) While learning the graphical structure of Bayesian networks from observational data is key to describing and helping understand data generating processes in complex applications, the task poses considerable challenges due to its computational complexity. The directed acyclic graph (DAG) representing a Bayesian network model is generally not identifiable from observational data, and a variety of methods exist to estimate its equivalence class instead. Under certain assumptions, the popular PC algorithm can consistently recover the correct equivalence class by testing for conditional independence (CI), starting from marginal independence relationships and progressively expanding the conditioning set. Here, we propose the dual PC algorithm, a novel scheme to carry out the CI tests within the PC algorithm by leveraging the inverse relationship between covariance and precision matrices. Notably, the elements of the precision matrix coincide with partial correlations for Gaussian data. Our algorithm then exploits block matrix inversions on the covariance and precision matrices to simultaneously perform tests on partial correlations of complementary (or dual) conditioning sets. The multiple CI tests of the dual PC algorithm, therefore, proceed by first considering marginal and full-order CI relationships and progressively moving to central-order ones. Simulation studies indicate that the dual PC algorithm outperforms the classical PC algorithm both in terms of run time and in recovering the underlying network structure.

(0 min) Black-box machine learning learning methods are now routinely used in high-risk settings, like medical diagnostics, which demand uncertainty quantification to avoid consequential model failures. Distribution-free uncertainty quantification (distribution-free UQ) is a user-friendly paradigm for creating statistically rigorous confidence intervals/sets for such predictions. Critically, the intervals/sets are valid without distributional assumptions or model assumptions, possessing explicit guarantees even with finitely many datapoints. Moreover, they adapt to the difficulty of the input; when the input example is difficult, the uncertainty intervals/sets are large, signaling that the model might be wrong. Without much work and without retraining, one can use distribution-free methods on any underlying algorithm, such as a neural network, to produce confidence sets guaranteed to contain the ground truth with a user-specified probability, such as 90%. Indeed, the methods are easy-to-understand and general, applying to many modern prediction problems arising in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, deep reinforcement learning, and so on. This hands-on introduction is aimed at a reader interested in the practical implementation of distribution-free UQ who is not necessarily a statistician. We lead the reader through the practical theory and applications of distribution-free UQ, beginning with conformal prediction and culminating with distribution-free control of any risk, such as the false-discovery rate, false positive rate of out-of-distribution detection, and so on. We will include many explanatory illustrations, examples, and code samples in Python, with PyTorch syntax. The goal is to provide the reader a working understanding of distribution-free UQ, allowing them to put confidence intervals on their algorithms, with one self-contained document.

(0 min) Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models, variational inference (VI) is often the preferable option. Unfortunately, VI makes strong assumptions on both the factorization and functional form of the posterior. In this work, we propose a new non-parametric variational approximation that makes no assumptions about the approximate posterior's functional form and allows practitioners to specify the exact dependencies the algorithm should respect or break. The approach relies on a new Langevin-type algorithm that operates on a modified energy function, where parts of the latent variables are averaged over samples from earlier iterations of the Markov chain. This way, statistical dependencies can be broken in a controlled way, allowing the chain to mix faster. This scheme can be further modified in a "dropout" manner, leading to even more scalability. We test our scheme for ResNet-20 on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and FMNIST. In all cases, we find improvements in convergence speed and/or final accuracy compared to SG-MCMC and VI.

(0 min) Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) allow us to understand the effect heterogeneity across a large population of individuals. However, typical CATE learners assume all confounding variables are measured in order for the CATE to be identifiable. This requirement can be satisfied by collecting many variables, at the expense of increased sample complexity for estimating CATEs. To combat this, we propose an energy-based model (EBM) that learns a low-dimensional representation of the variables by employing a noise contrastive loss function. With our EBM we introduce a preprocessing step that alleviates the dimensionality curse for any existing learner developed for estimating CATEs. We prove that our EBM keeps the representations partially identifiable up to some universal constant, as well as having universal approximation capability. These properties enable the representations to converge and keep the CATE estimates consistent. Experiments demonstrate the convergence of the representations, as well as show that estimating CATEs on our representations performs better than on the variables or the representations obtained through other dimensionality reduction methods.

(0 min) Due to the fast pace of life and online communications, the prevalence of English and the QWERTY keyboard, people tend to forgo using diacritics, make typographical errors (typos) when typing. Restoring diacritics and correcting spelling is important for proper language use and disambiguation of texts for both humans and downstream algorithms. However, both of these problems are typically addressed separately, i.e., state-of-the-art diacritics restoration methods do not tolerate other typos. In this work, we tackle both problems at once by employing newly-developed ByT5 byte-level transformer models. Our simultaneous diacritics restoration and typos correction approach demonstrates near state-of-the-art performance in 13 languages, reaching >96% of the alpha-word accuracy. We also perform diacritics restoration alone on 12 benchmark datasets with the additional one for the Lithuanian language. The experimental investigation proves that our approach is able to achieve comparable results (>98%) to previously reported despite being trained on fewer data. Our approach is also able to restore diacritics in words not seen during training with >76% accuracy. We also show the accuracies to further improve with longer training. All this shows a great real-world application potential of our suggested methods to more data, languages, and error classes.

(0 min) Communication efficiency has been widely recognized as the bottleneck for large-scale decentralized machine learning applications in multi-agent or federated environments. To tackle the communication bottleneck, there have been many efforts to design communication-compressed algorithms for decentralized nonconvex optimization, where the clients are only allowed to communicate a small amount of quantized information (aka bits) with their neighbors over a predefined graph topology. Despite significant efforts, the state-of-the-art algorithm in the nonconvex setting still suffers from a slower rate of convergence $O((G/T)^{2/3})$ compared with their uncompressed counterpart, where $G$ measures the data heterogeneity across different clients, and $T$ is the number of communication rounds. This paper proposes BEER, which adopts communication compression with gradient tracking, and shows it converges at a faster rate of $O(1/T)$. This significantly improves over the state-of-the-art rate, by matching the rate without compression even under arbitrary data heterogeneity. Numerical experiments are also provided to corroborate our theory and confirm the practical superiority of BEER in the data heterogeneous regime.

(0 min) Bilevel optimization, the problem of minimizing a value function which involves the arg-minimum of another function, appears in many areas of machine learning. In a large scale setting where the number of samples is huge, it is crucial to develop stochastic methods, which only use a few samples at a time to progress. However, computing the gradient of the value function involves solving a linear system, which makes it difficult to derive unbiased stochastic estimates. To overcome this problem we introduce a novel framework, in which the solution of the inner problem, the solution of the linear system, and the main variable evolve at the same time. These directions are written as a sum, making it straightforward to derive unbiased estimates. The simplicity of our approach allows us to develop global variance reduction algorithms, where the dynamics of all variables is subject to variance reduction. We demonstrate that SABA, an adaptation of the celebrated SAGA algorithm in our framework, has $O(\frac1T)$ convergence rate, and that it achieves linear convergence under Polyak-Lojasciewicz assumption. This is the first stochastic algorithm for bilevel optimization that verifies either of these properties. Numerical experiments validate the usefulness of our method.

(0 min) In black-box function optimization, we need to consider not only controllable design variables but also uncontrollable stochastic environment variables. In such cases, it is necessary to solve the optimization problem by taking into account the uncertainty of the environmental variables. Chance-constrained (CC) problem, the problem of maximizing the expected value under a certain level of constraint satisfaction probability, is one of the practically important problems in the presence of environmental variables. In this study, we consider distributionally robust CC (DRCC) problem and propose a novel DRCC Bayesian optimization method for the case where the distribution of the environmental variables cannot be precisely specified. We show that the proposed method can find an arbitrary accurate solution with high probability in a finite number of trials, and confirm the usefulness of the proposed method through numerical experiments.

(0 min) We consider the problem of minimizing a function over the manifold of orthogonal matrices. The majority of algorithms for this problem compute a direction in the tangent space, and then use a retraction to move in that direction while staying on the manifold. Unfortunately, the numerical computation of retractions on the orthogonal manifold always involves some expensive linear algebra operation, such as matrix inversion, exponential or square-root. These operations quickly become expensive as the dimension of the matrices grows. To bypass this limitation, we propose the landing algorithm which does not use retractions. The algorithm is not constrained to stay on the manifold but its evolution is driven by a potential energy which progressively attracts it towards the manifold. One iteration of the landing algorithm only involves matrix multiplications, which makes it cheap compared to its retraction counterparts. We provide an analysis of the convergence of the algorithm, and demonstrate its promises on large-scale and deep learning problems, where it is faster and less prone to numerical errors than retraction-based methods.

(0 min) Bayesian Likelihood-Free Inference (LFI) approaches allow to obtain posterior distributions for stochastic models with intractable likelihood, by relying on model simulations. In Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), a popular LFI method, summary statistics are used to reduce data dimensionality. ABC algorithms adaptively tailor simulations to the observation in order to sample from an approximate posterior, whose form depends on the chosen statistics. In this work, we introduce a new way to learn ABC statistics: we first generate parameter-simulation pairs from the model independently on the observation; then, we use Score Matching to train a neural conditional exponential family to approximate the likelihood. The exponential family is the largest class of distributions with fixed-size sufficient statistics; thus, we use them in ABC, which is intuitively appealing and has state-of-the-art performance. In parallel, we insert our likelihood approximation in an MCMC for doubly intractable distributions to draw posterior samples. We can repeat that for any number of observations with no additional model simulations, with performance comparable to related approaches. We validate our methods on toy models with known likelihood and a large-dimensional time-series model.

(0 min) This paper considers the problem of matrix-variate logistic regression. It derives the fundamental error threshold on estimating low-rank coefficient matrices in the logistic regression problem by obtaining a lower bound on the minimax risk. The bound depends explicitly on the dimension and distribution of the covariates, the rank and energy of the coefficient matrix, and the number of samples. The resulting bound is proportional to the intrinsic degrees of freedom in the problem, which suggests the sample complexity of the low-rank matrix logistic regression problem can be lower than that for vectorized logistic regression. The proof techniques utilized in this work also set the stage for development of minimax lower bounds for tensor-variate logistic regression problems.

(0 min) This paper studies Imitation Learning from Observations alone (ILFO) where the learner is presented with expert demonstrations that consist only of states visited by an expert (without access to actions taken by the expert). We present a provably efficient model-based framework MobILE to solve the ILFO problem. MobILE involves carefully trading off strategic exploration against imitation - this is achieved by integrating the idea of optimism in the face of uncertainty into the distribution matching imitation learning (IL) framework. We provide a unified analysis for MobILE, and demonstrate that MobILE enjoys strong performance guarantees for classes of MDP dynamics that satisfy certain well studied notions of structural complexity. We also show that the ILFO problem is strictly harder than the standard IL problem by presenting an exponential sample complexity separation between IL and ILFO. We complement these theoretical results with experimental simulations on benchmark OpenAI Gym tasks that indicate the efficacy of MobILE. Code for implementing the MobILE framework is available at https://github.com/rahulkidambi/MobILE-NeurIPS2021.

(0 min) Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) undergoes complicated multiplicative noise for the mean-square loss. We use this property of SGD noise to derive a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with simpler additive noise by performing a random time change. Using this formalism, we show that the log loss barrier $\Delta\log L=\log[L(\theta^s)/L(\theta^*)]$ between a local minimum $\theta^*$ and a saddle $\theta^s$ determines the escape rate of SGD from the local minimum, contrary to the previous results borrowing from physics that the linear loss barrier $\Delta L=L(\theta^s)-L(\theta^*)$ decides the escape rate. Our escape-rate formula strongly depends on the typical magnitude $h^*$ and the number $n$ of the outlier eigenvalues of the Hessian. This result explains an empirical fact that SGD prefers flat minima with low effective dimensions, giving an insight into implicit biases of SGD.

(0 min) We consider the problem of generating maximally adversarial disturbances for a given controller assuming only blackbox access to it. We propose an online learning approach to this problem that \emph{adaptively} generates disturbances based on control inputs chosen by the controller. The goal of the disturbance generator is to minimize \emph{regret} versus a benchmark disturbance-generating policy class, i.e., to maximize the cost incurred by the controller as well as possible compared to the best possible disturbance generator \emph{in hindsight} (chosen from a benchmark policy class). In the setting where the dynamics are linear and the costs are quadratic, we formulate our problem as an online trust region (OTR) problem with memory and present a new online learning algorithm (\emph{MOTR}) for this problem. We prove that this method competes with the best disturbance generator in hindsight (chosen from a rich class of benchmark policies that includes linear-dynamical disturbance generating policies). We demonstrate our approach on two simulated examples: (i) synthetically generated linear systems, and (ii) generating wind disturbances for the popular PX4 controller in the AirSim simulator. On these examples, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms several baseline approaches, including $H_{\infty}$ disturbance generation and gradient-based methods.

(2 min) Numerical Generalized Randomized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is introduced, as a robust, easy to use and computationally fast alternative to conventional Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for continuous target distributions. A wide class of piecewise deterministic Markov processes generalizing Randomized HMC (Bou-Rabee and Sanz-Serna, 2017) by allowing for state-dependent event rates is defined. Under very mild restrictions, such processes will have the desired target distribution as an invariant distribution. Secondly, the numerical implementation of such processes, based on adaptive numerical integration of second order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is considered. The numerical implementation yields an approximate, yet highly robust algorithm that, unlike conventional Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, enables the exploitation of the complete Hamiltonian trajectories (hence the title). The proposed algorithm may yield large speedups and improvements in stability relative to relevant benchmarks, while incurring numerical biases that are negligible relative to the overall Monte Carlo errors. Granted access to a high-quality ODE code, the proposed methodology is both easy to implement and use, even for highly challenging and high-dimensional target distributions.

(2 min) Although reinforcement learning has seen remarkable progress over the last years, solving robust dexterous object-manipulation tasks in multi-object settings remains a challenge. In this paper, we focus on models that can learn manipulation tasks in fixed multi-object settings and extrapolate this skill zero-shot without any drop in performance when the number of objects changes. We consider the generic task of bringing a specific cube out of a set to a goal position. We find that previous approaches, which primarily leverage attention and graph neural network-based architectures, do not generalize their skills when the number of input objects changes while scaling as $K^2$. We propose an alternative plug-and-play module based on relational inductive biases to overcome these limitations. Besides exceeding performances in their training environment, we show that our approach, which scales linearly in $K$, allows agents to extrapolate and generalize zero-shot to any new object number.

(2 min) Pseudo-labeling solutions for positive-unlabeled (PU) learning have the potential to result in higher performance compared to cost-sensitive learning but are vulnerable to incorrectly estimated pseudo-labels. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of a risk estimator that combines risk on PU and pseudo-labeled data. Furthermore, we show analytically as well as experimentally that such an estimator results in lower excess risk compared to using PU data alone, provided that enough samples are pseudo-labeled with acceptable error rates. We then propose PUUPL, a novel training procedure for PU learning that leverages the epistemic uncertainty of an ensemble of deep neural networks to minimize errors in pseudo-label selection. We conclude with extensive experiments showing the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm over different datasets, modalities, and learning tasks. These show that PUUPL enables a reduction of up to 20% in test error rates even when prior and negative samples are not provided for validation, setting a new state-of-the-art for PU learning.

(3 min) In this paper, the problem of training federated learning (FL) algorithms over a realistic wireless network is studied. In particular, in the considered model, wireless users execute an FL algorithm while training their local FL models using their own data and transmitting the trained local FL models to a base station (BS) that will generate a global FL model and send it back to the users. Since all training parameters are transmitted over wireless links, the quality of the training will be affected by wireless factors such as packet errors and the availability of wireless resources. Meanwhile, due to the limited wireless bandwidth, the BS must select an appropriate subset of users to execute the FL algorithm so as to build a global FL model accurately. This joint learning, wireless resource allocation, and user selection problem is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize an FL loss function that captures the performance of the FL algorithm. To address this problem, a closed-form expression for the expected convergence rate of the FL algorithm is first derived to quantify the impact of wireless factors on FL. Then, based on the expected convergence rate of the FL algorithm, the optimal transmit power for each user is derived, under a given user selection and uplink resource block (RB) allocation scheme. Finally, the user selection and uplink RB allocation is optimized so as to minimize the FL loss function. Simulation results show that the proposed joint federated learning and communication framework can reduce the FL loss function value by up to 10% and 16%, respectively, compared to: 1) An optimal user selection algorithm with random resource allocation and 2) a standard FL algorithm with random user selection and resource allocation.

(2 min) We investigate approximation guarantees provided by logistic regression for the fundamental problem of agnostic learning of homogeneous halfspaces. Previously, for a certain broad class of "well-behaved" distributions on the examples, Diakonikolas et al. (2020) proved an $\tilde{\Omega}(\textrm{OPT})$ lower bound, while Frei et al. (2021) proved an $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\textrm{OPT}})$ upper bound, where $\textrm{OPT}$ denotes the best zero-one/misclassification risk of a homogeneous halfspace. In this paper, we close this gap by constructing a well-behaved distribution such that the global minimizer of the logistic risk over this distribution only achieves $\Omega(\sqrt{\textrm{OPT}})$ misclassification risk, matching the upper bound in (Frei et al., 2021). On the other hand, we also show that if we impose a radial-Lipschitzness condition in addition to well-behaved-ness on the distribution, logistic regression on a ball of bounded radius reaches $\tilde{O}(\textrm{OPT})$ misclassification risk. Our techniques also show for any well-behaved distribution, regardless of radial Lipschitzness, we can overcome the $\Omega(\sqrt{\textrm{OPT}})$ lower bound for logistic loss simply at the cost of one additional convex optimization step involving the hinge loss and attain $\tilde{O}(\textrm{OPT})$ misclassification risk. This two-step convex optimization algorithm is simpler than previous methods obtaining this guarantee, all of which require solving $O(\log(1/\textrm{OPT}))$ minimization problems.

(2 min) Distributed learning has become a hot research topic due to its wide application in clusterbased large-scale learning, federated learning, edge computing and so on. Most traditional distributed learning methods typically assume no failure or attack. However, many unexpected cases, such as communication failure and even malicious attack, may happen in real applications. Hence, Byzantine learning (BL), which refers to distributed learning with failure or attack, has recently attracted much attention. Most existing BL methods are synchronous, which are impractical in some applications due to heterogeneous or offline workers. In these cases, asynchronous BL (ABL) is usually preferred. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called buffered asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (BASGD), for ABL. To the best of our knowledge, BASGD is the first ABL method that can resist non-omniscient attacks without storing any instances on server. Furthermore, we also propose an improved variant of BASGD, called BASGD with momentum (BASGDm), by introducing momentum into BASGD. BASGDm can resist both non-omniscient and omniscient attacks. Compared with those methods which need to store instances on server, BASGD and BASGDm have a wider scope of application. Both BASGD and BASGDm are compatible with various aggregation rules. Moreover, both BASGD and BASGDm are proved to be convergent and be able to resist failure or attack. Empirical results show that our methods significantly outperform existing ABL baselines when there exists failure or attack on workers.

(2 min) Kernel mean embeddings are a powerful tool to represent probability distributions over arbitrary spaces as single points in a Hilbert space. Yet, the cost of computing and storing such embeddings prohibits their direct use in large-scale settings. We propose an efficient approximation procedure based on the Nystr\"om method, which exploits a small random subset of the dataset. Our main result is an upper bound on the approximation error of this procedure. It yields sufficient conditions on the subsample size to obtain the standard $n^{-1/2}$ rate while reducing computational costs. We discuss applications of this result for the approximation of the maximum mean discrepancy and quadrature rules, and illustrate our theoretical findings with numerical experiments.

(2 min) Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a method for learning a stochastic policy for generating compositional objects, such as graphs or strings, from a given unnormalized density by sequences of actions, where many possible action sequences may lead to the same object. Prior temporal difference-like learning objectives for training GFlowNets, such as flow matching and detailed balance, are prone to inefficient credit propagation across action sequences, particularly in the case of long sequences. We propose a new learning objective for GFlowNets, trajectory balance, as a more efficient alternative to previously used objectives. We prove that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution. In experiments on four distinct domains, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectory balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.

(2 min) We propose a \emph{collaborative} multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm named variational policy propagation (VPP) to learn a \emph{joint} policy through the interactions over agents. We prove that the joint policy is a Markov Random Field under some mild conditions, which in turn reduces the policy space effectively. We integrate the variational inference as special differentiable layers in policy such that the actions can be efficiently sampled from the Markov Random Field and the overall policy is differentiable. We evaluate our algorithm on several large scale challenging tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.

(2 min) In modern neural networks like Transformers, linear layers require significant memory to store activations during backward pass. This study proposes a memory reduction approach to perform backpropagation through linear layers. Since the gradients of linear layers are computed by matrix multiplications, we consider methods for randomized matrix multiplications and demonstrate that they require less memory with a moderate decrease of the test accuracy. Also, we investigate the variance of the gradient estimate induced by the randomized matrix multiplication. We compare this variance with the variance coming from gradient estimation based on the batch of samples. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method on the fine-tuning of the pre-trained RoBERTa model on GLUE tasks.

(2 min) From the sampling of data to the initialisation of parameters, randomness is ubiquitous in modern Machine Learning practice. Understanding the statistical fluctuations engendered by the different sources of randomness in prediction is therefore key to understanding robust generalisation. In this manuscript we develop a quantitative and rigorous theory for the study of fluctuations in an ensemble of generalised linear models trained on different, but correlated, features in high-dimensions. In particular, we provide a complete description of the asymptotic joint distribution of the empirical risk minimiser for generic convex loss and regularisation in the high-dimensional limit. Our result encompasses a rich set of classification and regression tasks, such as the lazy regime of overparametrised neural networks, or equivalently the random features approximation of kernels. While allowing to study directly the mitigating effect of ensembling (or bagging) on the bias-variance decomposition of the test error, our analysis also helps disentangle the contribution of statistical fluctuations, and the singular role played by the interpolation threshold that are at the roots of the "double-descent" phenomenon.

(2 min) This paper provides a unified perspective for the Kullback-Leibler (KL)-divergence and the integral probability metrics (IPMs) from the perspective of maximum likelihood density-ratio estimation (DRE). Both the KL-divergence and the IPMs are widely used in various fields in applications such as generative modeling. However, a unified understanding of these concepts has still been unexplored. In this paper, we show that the KL-divergence and the IPMs can be represented as maximal likelihoods differing only by sampling schemes, and use this result to derive a unified form of the IPMs and a relaxed estimation method. To develop the estimation problem, we construct an unconstrained maximum likelihood estimator to perform DRE with a stratified sampling scheme. We further propose a novel class of probability divergences, called the Density Ratio Metrics (DRMs), that interpolates the KL-divergence and the IPMs. In addition to these findings, we also introduce some applications of the DRMs, such as DRE and generative adversarial networks. In experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

(2 min) We consider the infinitely many-armed bandit problem with rotting rewards, where the mean reward of an arm decreases at each pull of the arm according to an arbitrary trend with maximum rotting rate $\varrho=o(1)$. We show that this learning problem has an $\Omega(\max\{\varrho^{1/3}T,\sqrt{T}\})$ worst-case regret lower bound where $T$ is the horizon time. We show that a matching upper bound $\tilde{O}(\max\{\varrho^{1/3}T,\sqrt{T}\})$, up to a poly-logarithmic factor, can be achieved by an algorithm that uses a UCB index for each arm and a threshold value to decide whether to continue pulling an arm or remove the arm from further consideration, when the algorithm knows the value of the maximum rotting rate $\varrho$. We also show that an $\tilde{O}(\max\{\varrho^{1/3}T,T^{3/4}\})$ regret upper bound can be achieved by an algorithm that does not know the value of $\varrho$, by using an adaptive UCB index along with an adaptive threshold value.

(2 min) The release of tabular benchmarks, such as NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201, has significantly lowered the computational overhead for conducting scientific research in neural architecture search (NAS). Although they have been widely adopted and used to tune real-world NAS algorithms, these benchmarks are limited to small search spaces and focus solely on image classification. Recently, several new NAS benchmarks have been introduced that cover significantly larger search spaces over a wide range of tasks, including object detection, speech recognition, and natural language processing. However, substantial differences among these NAS benchmarks have so far prevented their widespread adoption, limiting researchers to using just a few benchmarks. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of popular NAS algorithms and performance prediction methods across 25 different combinations of search spaces and datasets, finding that many conclusions drawn from a few NAS benchmarks do not generalize to other benchmarks. To help remedy this problem, we introduce NAS-Bench-Suite, a comprehensive and extensible collection of NAS benchmarks, accessible through a unified interface, created with the aim to facilitate reproducible, generalizable, and rapid NAS research. Our code is available at https://github.com/automl/naslib.

(2 min) We propose Continual Repeated Annealed Flow Transport Monte Carlo (CRAFT), a method that combines a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler (itself a generalization of Annealed Importance Sampling) with variational inference using normalizing flows. The normalizing flows are directly trained to transport between annealing temperatures using a KL divergence for each transition. This optimization objective is itself estimated using the normalizing flow/SMC approximation. We show conceptually and using multiple empirical examples that CRAFT improves on Annealed Flow Transport Monte Carlo (Arbel et al., 2021), on which it builds and also on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based Stochastic Normalizing Flows (Wu et al., 2020). By incorporating CRAFT within particle MCMC, we show that such learnt samplers can achieve impressively accurate results on a challenging lattice field theory example.

(2 min) We propose a method for quantifying uncertainty in high-dimensional PDE systems with random parameters, where the number of solution evaluations is small. Parametric PDE solutions are often approximated using a spectral decomposition based on polynomial chaos expansions. For the class of systems we consider (i.e., high dimensional with limited solution evaluations) the coefficients are given by an underdetermined linear system in a regression formulation. This implies additional assumptions, such as sparsity of the coefficient vector, are needed to approximate the solution. Here, we present an approach where we assume the coefficients are close to the range of a generative model that maps from a low to a high dimensional space of coefficients. Our approach is inspired be recent work examining how generative models can be used for compressed sensing in systems with random Gaussian measurement matrices. Using results from PDE theory on coefficient decay rates, we construct an explicit generative model that predicts the polynomial chaos coefficient magnitudes. The algorithm we developed to find the coefficients, which we call GenMod, is composed of two main steps. First, we predict the coefficient signs using Orthogonal Matching Pursuit. Then, we assume the coefficients are within a sparse deviation from the range of a sign-adjusted generative model. This allows us to find the coefficients by solving a nonconvex optimization problem, over the input space of the generative model and the space of sparse vectors. We obtain theoretical recovery results for a Lipschitz continuous generative model and for a more specific generative model, based on coefficient decay rate bounds. We examine three high-dimensional problems and show that, for all three examples, the generative model approach outperforms sparsity promoting methods at small sample sizes.

(2 min) Recently, extracting data-driven governing laws of dynamical systems through deep learning frameworks has gained a lot of attention in various fields. Moreover, a growing amount of research work tends to transfer deterministic dynamical systems to stochastic dynamical systems, especially those driven by non-Gaussian multiplicative noise. However, lots of log-likelihood based algorithms that work well for Gaussian cases cannot be directly extended to non-Gaussian scenarios which could have high error and low convergence issues. In this work, we overcome some of these challenges and identify stochastic dynamical systems driven by $\alpha$-stable L\'evy noise from only random pairwise data. Our innovations include: (1) designing a deep learning approach to learn both drift and diffusion terms for L\'evy induced noise with $\alpha$ across all values, (2) learning complex multiplicative noise without restrictions on small noise intensity, (3) proposing an end-to-end complete framework for stochastic systems identification under a general input data assumption, that is, $\alpha$-stable random variable. Finally, numerical experiments and comparisons with the non-local Kramers-Moyal formulas with moment generating function confirm the effectiveness of our method.

(2 min) Classification and topic modeling are popular techniques in machine learning that extract information from large-scale datasets. By incorporating a priori information such as labels or important features, methods have been developed to perform classification and topic modeling tasks; however, most methods that can perform both do not allow for guidance of the topics or features. In this paper, we propose a method, namely Guided Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization (GSSNMF), that performs both classification and topic modeling by incorporating supervision from both pre-assigned document class labels and user-designed seed words. We test the performance of this method through its application to legal documents provided by the California Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to free innocent convicted persons and reform the justice system. The results show that our proposed method improves both classification accuracy and topic coherence in comparison to past methods like Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization (SSNMF) and Guided Non-negative Matrix Factorization (Guided NMF).

(2 min) Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense 'closest' to the full Bayesian posterior. Closeness is typically defined through the selection of an appropriate loss functional such as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this paper, we explore a new formulation of variational inference by exploiting the fact that (most) PDFs are members of a Bayesian Hilbert space under careful definitions of vector addition, scalar multiplication and an inner product. We show that variational inference based on KL divergence then amounts to an iterative projection, in the Euclidean sense, of the Bayesian posterior onto a subspace corresponding to the selected approximation family. We work through the details of this general framework for the specific case of the Gaussian approximation family and show the equivalence to another Gaussian variational inference approach. We furthermore discuss the implications for systems that exhibit sparsity, which is handled naturally in Bayesian space, and give an example of a high-dimensional robotic state estimation problem that can be handled as a result. Finally, we provide some preliminary examples of how the approach could be applied to non-Gaussian inference.

(2 min) Time dependent reliability analysis and uncertainty quantification of structural system subjected to stochastic forcing function is a challenging endeavour as it necessitates considerable computational time. We investigate the efficacy of recently proposed DeepONet in solving time dependent reliability analysis and uncertainty quantification of systems subjected to stochastic loading. Unlike conventional machine learning and deep learning algorithms, DeepONet learns is a operator network and learns a function to function mapping and hence, is ideally suited to propagate the uncertainty from the stochastic forcing function to the output responses. We use DeepONet to build a surrogate model for the dynamical system under consideration. Multiple case studies, involving both toy and benchmark problems, have been conducted to examine the efficacy of DeepONet in time dependent reliability analysis and uncertainty quantification of linear and nonlinear dynamical systems. Results obtained indicate that the DeepONet architecture is accurate as well as efficient. Moreover, DeepONet posses zero shot learning capabilities and hence, a trained model easily generalizes to unseen and new environment with no further training.

(2 min) Maximizing a monotone submodular function is a fundamental task in machine learning. In this paper, we study the deletion robust version of the problem under the classic matroids constraint. Here the goal is to extract a small size summary of the dataset that contains a high value independent set even after an adversary deleted some elements. We present constant-factor approximation algorithms, whose space complexity depends on the rank $k$ of the matroid and the number $d$ of deleted elements. In the centralized setting we present a $(3.582+O(\varepsilon))$-approximation algorithm with summary size $O(k + \frac{d \log k}{\varepsilon^2})$. In the streaming setting we provide a $(5.582+O(\varepsilon))$-approximation algorithm with summary size and memory $O(k + \frac{d \log k}{\varepsilon^2})$. We complement our theoretical results with an in-depth experimental analysis showing the effectiveness of our algorithms on real-world datasets.

(2 min) This paper considers the problem of supervised learning with linear methods when both features and labels can be corrupted, either in the form of heavy tailed data and/or corrupted rows. We introduce a combination of coordinate gradient descent as a learning algorithm together with robust estimators of the partial derivatives. This leads to robust statistical learning methods that have a numerical complexity nearly identical to non-robust ones based on empirical risk minimization. The main idea is simple: while robust learning with gradient descent requires the computational cost of robustly estimating the whole gradient to update all parameters, a parameter can be updated immediately using a robust estimator of a single partial derivative in coordinate gradient descent. We prove upper bounds on the generalization error of the algorithms derived from this idea, that control both the optimization and statistical errors with and without a strong convexity assumption of the risk. Finally, we propose an efficient implementation of this approach in a new python library called linlearn, and demonstrate through extensive numerical experiments that our approach introduces a new interesting compromise between robustness, statistical performance and numerical efficiency for this problem.

(2 min) We study the problem of multi-agent control of a dynamical system with known dynamics and adversarial disturbances. Our study focuses on optimal control without centralized precomputed policies, but rather with adaptive control policies for the different agents that are only equipped with a stabilizing controller. We give a reduction from any (standard) regret minimizing control method to a distributed algorithm. The reduction guarantees that the resulting distributed algorithm has low regret relative to the optimal precomputed joint policy. Our methodology involves generalizing online convex optimization to a multi-agent setting and applying recent tools from nonstochastic control derived for a single agent. We empirically evaluate our method on a model of an overactuated aircraft. We show that the distributed method is robust to failure and to adversarial perturbations in the dynamics.

(2 min) Although Transformer-based methods have significantly improved state-of-the-art results for long-term series forecasting, they are not only computationally expensive but more importantly, are unable to capture the global view of time series (e.g. overall trend). To address these problems, we propose to combine Transformer with the seasonal-trend decomposition method, in which the decomposition method captures the global profile of time series while Transformers capture more detailed structures. To further enhance the performance of Transformer for long-term prediction, we exploit the fact that most time series tend to have a sparse representation in well-known basis such as Fourier transform, and develop a frequency enhanced Transformer. Besides being more effective, the proposed method, termed as Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer ({\bf FEDformer}), is more efficient than standard Transformer with a linear complexity to the sequence length. Our empirical studies with six benchmark datasets show that compared with state-of-the-art methods, FEDformer can reduce prediction error by $14.8\%$ and $22.6\%$ for multivariate and univariate time series, respectively. the code will be released soon.

(2 min) This work theoretically studies stochastic neural networks, a main type of neural network in use. Specifically, we prove that as the width of an optimized stochastic neural network tends to infinity, its predictive variance on the training set decreases to zero. Two common examples that our theory applies to are neural networks with dropout and variational autoencoders. Our result helps better understand how stochasticity affects the learning of neural networks and thus design better architectures for practical problems.

(2 min) We introduce a new family of techniques to post-process ("wrap") a black-box classifier in order to reduce its bias. Our technique builds on the recent analysis of improper loss functions whose optimisation can correct any twist in prediction, unfairness being treated as a twist. In the post-processing, we learn a wrapper function which we define as an {\alpha}-tree, which modifies the prediction. We provide two generic boosting algorithms to learn {\alpha}-trees. We show that our modification has appealing properties in terms of composition of{\alpha}-trees, generalization, interpretability, and KL divergence between modified and original predictions. We exemplify the use of our technique in three fairness notions: conditional value at risk, equality of opportunity, and statistical parity; and provide experiments on several readily available datasets.

(2 min) Currently, there are no convincing proxies for the fundamentals of cryptocurrency assets. We propose a new market-to-fundamental ratio, the price-to-utility (PU) ratio, utilizing unique blockchain accounting methods. We then proxy various fundamental-to-market ratios by Bitcoin historical data and find they have little predictive power for short-term bitcoin returns. However, PU ratio effectively predicts long-term bitcoin returns. We verify PU ratio valuation by unsupervised and supervised machine learning. The valuation method informs investment returns and predicts bull markets effectively. Finally, we present an automated trading strategy advised by the PU ratio that outperforms the conventional buy-and-hold and market-timing strategies. We distribute the trading algorithms as open-source software via Python Package Index for future research.

(2 min) Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of good users share the same instance of contextual bandits with $S$ contexts and $A$ actions (items). Naturally, whether a user is good or adversarial is not known in advance. The goal is to robustly learn the policy that maximizes rewards for good users with as few user interactions as possible. Without adversarial users, established results in collaborative filtering show that $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ per-user interactions suffice to learn a good policy, precisely because information can be shared across users. This parallelization gain is fundamentally altered by the presence of adversarial users: unless there are super-polynomial number of users, we show a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(\min(S,A) \cdot \alpha^2 / \epsilon^2)$ {\it per-user} interactions to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for the good users. We then show we can achieve an $\tilde{O}(\min(S,A)\cdot \alpha/\epsilon^2)$ upper-bound, by employing efficient robust mean estimators for both uni-variate and high-dimensional random variables. We also show that this can be improved depending on the distributions of contexts.

(2 min) Quantile Regression (QR) provides a way to approximate a single conditional quantile. To have a more informative description of the conditional distribution, QR can be merged with deep learning techniques to simultaneously estimate multiple quantiles. However, the minimisation of the QR-loss function does not guarantee non-crossing quantiles, which affects the validity of such predictions and introduces a critical issue in certain scenarios. In this article, we propose a generic deep learning algorithm for predicting an arbitrary number of quantiles that ensures the quantile monotonicity constraint up to the machine precision and maintains its modelling performance with respect to alternative models. The presented method is evaluated over several real-world datasets obtaining state-of-the-art results as well as showing that it scales to large-size data sets.

(2 min) Motivation: The branching processes model yields unevenly stochastically distributed data that consists of sparse and dense regions. The work tries to solve the problem of a precise evaluation of a parameter for this type of model. The application of the branching processes model to cancer cell evolution has many difficulties like high dimensionality and the rare appearance of a result of interest. Moreover, we would like to solve the ambitious task of obtaining the coefficients of the model reflecting the relationship of driver genes mutations and cancer hallmarks on the basis of personal data of variant allele frequencies. Results: The Approximate Bayesian computation method based on the Isolation kernel is designed. The method includes a transformation row data to a Hilbert space (mapping) and measures the similarity between simulation points and maxima weighted Isolation kernel mapping related to the observation point. Also, we designed a heuristic algorithm to find parameter estimation without gradient calculation and dimension-independent. The advantage of the proposed machine learning method is shown for multidimensional test data as well as for an example of cancer cell evolution.

(2 min) Random partition models are widely used in Bayesian methods for various clustering tasks, such as mixture models, topic models, and community detection problems. While the number of clusters induced by random partition models has been studied extensively, another important model property regarding the balancedness of cluster sizes has been largely neglected. We formulate a framework to define and theoretically study the balancedness of exchangeable random partition models, by analyzing how a model assigns probabilities to partitions with different levels of balancedness. We demonstrate that the "rich-get-richer" characteristic of many existing popular random partition models is an inevitable consequence of two common assumptions: product-form exchangeability and projectivity. We propose a principled way to compare the balancedness of random partition models, which gives a better understanding of what model works better and what doesn't for different applications. We also introduce the "rich-get-poorer" random partition models and illustrate their application to entity resolution tasks.

(2 min) Domain generalization asks for models trained on a set of training environments to perform well on unseen test environments. Recently, a series of algorithms such as Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) has been proposed for domain generalization. However, Rosenfeld et al. (2021) shows that in a simple linear data model, even if non-convexity issues are ignored, IRM and its extensions cannot generalize to unseen environments with less than $d_s+1$ training environments, where $d_s$ is the dimension of the spurious-feature subspace. In this paper, we propose to achieve domain generalization with Invariant-feature Subspace Recovery (ISR). Our first algorithm, ISR-Mean, can identify the subspace spanned by invariant features from the first-order moments of the class-conditional distributions, and achieve provable domain generalization with $d_s+1$ training environments under the data model of Rosenfeld et al. (2021). Our second algorithm, ISR-Cov, further reduces the required number of training environments to $O(1)$ using the information of second-order moments. Notably, unlike IRM, our algorithms bypass non-convexity issues and enjoy global convergence guarantees. Empirically, our ISRs can obtain superior performance compared with IRM on synthetic benchmarks. In addition, on three real-world image and text datasets, we show that ISR-Mean can be used as a simple yet effective post-processing method to increase the worst-case accuracy of trained models against spurious correlations and group shifts.

(2 min) In this manuscript, we consider the problem of kernel classification under the Gaussian data design, and under source and capacity assumptions on the dataset. While the decay rates of the prediction error have been extensively studied under much more generic assumptions for kernel ridge regression, deriving decay rates for the classification problem has been hitherto considered a much more challenging task. In this work we leverage recent analytical results for learning curves of linear classification with generic loss function to derive the rates of decay of the misclassification (prediction) error with the sample complexity for two standard classification settings, namely margin-maximizing Support Vector Machines (SVM) and ridge classification. Using numerical and analytical arguments, we derive the error rates as a function of the source and capacity coefficients, and contrast the two methods.

(2 min) Neural compression algorithms are typically based on autoencoders that require specialized encoder and decoder architectures for different data modalities. In this paper, we propose COIN++, a neural compression framework that seamlessly handles a wide range of data modalities. Our approach is based on converting data to implicit neural representations, i.e. neural functions that map coordinates (such as pixel locations) to features (such as RGB values). Then, instead of storing the weights of the implicit neural representation directly, we store modulations applied to a meta-learned base network as a compressed code for the data. We further quantize and entropy code these modulations, leading to large compression gains while reducing encoding time by two orders of magnitude compared to baselines. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by compressing various data modalities, from images to medical and climate data.

(2 min) Computing a Gaussian process (GP) posterior has a computational cost cubical in the number of historical points. A reformulation of the same GP posterior highlights that this complexity mainly depends on how many \emph{unique} historical points are considered. This can have important implication in active learning settings, where the set of historical points is constructed sequentially by the learner. We show that sequential black-box optimization based on GPs (GP-Opt) can be made efficient by sticking to a candidate solution for multiple evaluation steps and switch only when necessary. Limiting the number of switches also limits the number of unique points in the history of the GP. Thus, the efficient GP reformulation can be used to exactly and cheaply compute the posteriors required to run the GP-Opt algorithms. This approach is especially useful in real-world applications of GP-Opt with high switch costs (e.g. switching chemicals in wet labs, data/model loading in hyperparameter optimization). As examples of this meta-approach, we modify two well-established GP-Opt algorithms, GP-UCB and GP-EI, to switch candidates as infrequently as possible adapting rules from batched GP-Opt. These versions preserve all the theoretical no-regret guarantees while improving practical aspects of the algorithms such as runtime, memory complexity, and the ability of batching candidates and evaluating them in parallel.

(2 min) Optimal transport (OT) has seen its popularity in various fields of applications. We start by observing that the OT problem can be viewed as an instance of a general symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix-valued OT problem, where the cost, the marginals, and the coupling are represented as block matrices and each component block is a SPD matrix. The summation of row blocks and column blocks in the coupling matrix are constrained by the given block-SPD marginals. We endow the set of such block-coupling matrices with a novel Riemannian manifold structure. This allows to exploit the versatile Riemannian optimization framework to solve generic SPD matrix-valued OT problems. We illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach in several applications.

(2 min) Random forests are considered one of the best out-of-the-box classification and regression algorithms due to their high level of predictive performance with relatively little tuning. Pairwise proximities can be computed from a trained random forest which measure the similarity between data points relative to the supervised task. Random forest proximities have been used in many applications including the identification of variable importance, data imputation, outlier detection, and data visualization. However, existing definitions of random forest proximities do not accurately reflect the data geometry learned by the random forest. In this paper, we introduce a novel definition of random forest proximities called Random Forest-Geometry- and Accuracy-Preserving proximities (RF-GAP). We prove that the proximity-weighted sum (regression) or majority vote (classification) using RF-GAP exactly match the out-of-bag random forest prediction, thus capturing the data geometry learned by the random forest. We empirically show that this improved geometric representation outperforms traditional random forest proximities in tasks such as data imputation and provides outlier detection and visualization results consistent with the learned data geometry.

(2 min) In recent years, identification of nonlinear dynamical systems from data has become increasingly popular. Sparse regression approaches, such as Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy), fostered the development of novel governing equation identification algorithms assuming the state variables are known a priori and the governing equations lend themselves to sparse, linear expansions in a (nonlinear) basis of the state variables. In the context of the identification of governing equations of nonlinear dynamical systems, one faces the problem of identifiability of model parameters when state measurements are corrupted by noise. Measurement noise affects the stability of the recovery process yielding incorrect sparsity patterns and inaccurate estimation of coefficients of the governing equations. In this work, we investigate and compare the performance of several local and global smoothing techniques to a priori denoise the state measurements and numerically estimate the state time-derivatives to improve the accuracy and robustness of two sparse regression methods to recover governing equations: Sequentially Thresholded Least Squares (STLS) and Weighted Basis Pursuit Denoising (WBPDN) algorithms. We empirically show that, in general, global methods, which use the entire measurement data set, outperform local methods, which employ a neighboring data subset around a local point. We additionally compare Generalized Cross Validation (GCV) and Pareto curve criteria as model selection techniques to automatically estimate near optimal tuning parameters, and conclude that Pareto curves yield better results. The performance of the denoising strategies and sparse regression methods is empirically evaluated through well-known benchmark problems of nonlinear dynamical systems.

(2 min) With the recent advance of deep learning, neural networks have been extensively used for the task of molecular generation. Many deep generators extract atomic relations from molecular graphs and ignore hierarchical information at both atom and molecule levels. In order to extract such hierarchical information, we propose a novel hyperbolic generative model. Our model contains three parts: first, a fully hyperbolic junction-tree encoder-decoder that embeds the hierarchical information of the molecules in the latent hyperbolic space; second, a latent generative adversarial network for generating the latent embeddings; third, a molecular generator that inherits the decoders from the first part and the latent generator from the second part. We evaluate our model on the ZINC dataset using the MOSES benchmarking platform and achieve competitive results, especially in metrics about structural similarity.

(2 min) Learning from repeated play in a fixed two-player zero-sum game is a classic problem in game theory and online learning. We consider a variant of this problem where the game payoff matrix changes over time, possibly in an adversarial manner. We first present three performance measures to guide the algorithmic design for this problem: 1) the well-studied individual regret, 2) an extension of duality gap, and 3) a new measure called dynamic Nash Equilibrium regret, which quantifies the cumulative difference between the player's payoff and the minimax game value. Next, we develop a single parameter-free algorithm that simultaneously enjoys favorable guarantees under all these three performance measures. These guarantees are adaptive to different non-stationarity measures of the payoff matrices and, importantly, recover the best known results when the payoff matrix is fixed. Our algorithm is based on a two-layer structure with a meta-algorithm learning over a group of black-box base-learners satisfying a certain property, along with several novel ingredients specifically designed for the time-varying game setting. Empirical results further validate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

(2 min) Contrastive learning aims to extract distinctive features from data by finding an embedding representation where similar samples are close to each other, and different ones are far apart. We study generalization in contrastive learning, focusing on its simplest representative: Siamese Neural Networks (SNNs). We show that Double Descent also appears in SNNs and is exacerbated by noise. We point out that SNNs can be affected by two distinct sources of noise: Pair Label Noise (PLN) and Single Label Noise (SLN). The effect of SLN is asymmetric, but it preserves similarity relations, while PLN is symmetric but breaks transitivity. We show that the dataset topology crucially affects generalization. While sparse datasets show the same performances under SLN and PLN for an equal amount of noise, SLN outperforms PLN in the overparametrized region in dense datasets. Indeed, in this regime, PLN similarity violation becomes macroscopical, corrupting the dataset to the point where complete overfitting cannot be achieved. We call this phenomenon Density-Induced Break of Similarity (DIBS). We also probe the equivalence between online optimization and offline generalization for similarity tasks. We observe that an online/offline correspondence in similarity learning can be affected by both the network architecture and label noise.

(2 min) Estimation of causal effects using machine learning methods has become an active research field in econometrics. In this paper, we study the finite sample performance of meta-learners for estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects under the usage of sample-splitting and cross-fitting to reduce the overfitting bias. In both synthetic and semi-synthetic simulations we find that the performance of the meta-learners in finite samples greatly depends on the estimation procedure. The results imply that sample-splitting and cross-fitting are beneficial in large samples for bias reduction and efficiency of the meta-learners, respectively, whereas full-sample estimation is preferable in small samples. Furthermore, we derive practical recommendations for application of specific meta-learners in empirical studies depending on particular data characteristics such as treatment shares and sample size.

(2 min) We study the conjectured relationship between the implicit regularization in neural networks, trained with gradient-based methods, and rank minimization of their weight matrices. Previously, it was proved that for linear networks (of depth 2 and vector-valued outputs), gradient flow (GF) w.r.t. the square loss acts as a rank minimization heuristic. However, understanding to what extent this generalizes to nonlinear networks is an open problem. In this paper, we focus on nonlinear ReLU networks, providing several new positive and negative results. On the negative side, we prove (and demonstrate empirically) that, unlike the linear case, GF on ReLU networks may no longer tend to minimize ranks, in a rather strong sense (even approximately, for "most" datasets of size 2). On the positive side, we reveal that ReLU networks of sufficient depth are provably biased towards low-rank solutions in several reasonable settings.

(2 min) We introduce ApolloRL, an open platform for research in reinforcement learning for autonomous driving. The platform provides a complete closed-loop pipeline with training, simulation, and evaluation components. It comes with 300 hours of real-world data in driving scenarios and popular baselines such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agents. We elaborate in this paper on the architecture and the environment defined in the platform. In addition, we discuss the performance of the baseline agents in the ApolloRL environment.

(2 min) Antibodies are canonically Y-shaped multimeric proteins capable of highly specific molecular recognition. The CDRH3 region located at the tip of variable chains of an antibody dominates antigen-binding specificity. Therefore, it is a priority to design optimal antigen-specific CDRH3 regions to develop therapeutic antibodies to combat harmful pathogens. However, the combinatorial nature of CDRH3 sequence space makes it impossible to search for an optimal binding sequence exhaustively and efficiently, especially not experimentally. Here, we present AntBO: a Combinatorial Bayesian Optimisation framework enabling efficient in silico design of the CDRH3 region. Ideally, antibodies should bind to their target antigen and be free from any harmful outcomes. Therefore, we introduce the CDRH3 trust region that restricts the search to sequences with feasible developability scores. To benchmark AntBO, we use the Absolut! software suite as a black-box oracle because it can score the target specificity and affinity of designed antibodies in silico in an unconstrained fashion. The results across 188 antigens demonstrate the benefit of AntBO in designing CDRH3 regions with diverse biophysical properties. In under 200 protein designs, AntBO can suggest antibody sequences that outperform the best binding sequence drawn from 6.9 million experimentally obtained CDRH3s and a commonly used genetic algorithm baseline. Additionally, AntBO finds very-high affinity CDRH3 sequences in only 38 protein designs whilst requiring no domain knowledge. We conclude AntBO brings automated antibody design methods closer to what is practically viable for in vitro experimentation.

(2 min) We consider offline Imitation Learning from corrupted demonstrations where a constant fraction of data can be noise or even arbitrary outliers. Classical approaches such as Behavior Cloning assumes that demonstrations are collected by an presumably optimal expert, hence may fail drastically when learning from corrupted demonstrations. We propose a novel robust algorithm by minimizing a Median-of-Means (MOM) objective which guarantees the accurate estimation of policy, even in the presence of constant fraction of outliers. Our theoretical analysis shows that our robust method in the corrupted setting enjoys nearly the same error scaling and sample complexity guarantees as the classical Behavior Cloning in the expert demonstration setting. Our experiments on continuous-control benchmarks validate that our method exhibits the predicted robustness and effectiveness, and achieves competitive results compared to existing imitation learning methods.

(2 min) In this work, we study the use of the Bellman equation as a surrogate objective for value prediction accuracy. While the Bellman equation is uniquely solved by the true value function over all state-action pairs, we find that the Bellman error (the difference between both sides of the equation) is a poor proxy for the accuracy of the value function. In particular, we show that (1) due to cancellations from both sides of the Bellman equation, the magnitude of the Bellman error is only weakly related to the distance to the true value function, even when considering all state-action pairs, and (2) in the finite data regime, the Bellman equation can be satisfied exactly by infinitely many suboptimal solutions. This means that the Bellman error can be minimized without improving the accuracy of the value function. We demonstrate these phenomena through a series of propositions, illustrative toy examples, and empirical analysis in standard benchmark domains.

(2 min) Arbitrary conditioning is an important problem in unsupervised learning, where we seek to model the conditional densities $p(\mathbf{x}_u \mid \mathbf{x}_o)$ that underly some data, for all possible non-intersecting subsets $o, u \subset \{1, \dots , d\}$. However, the vast majority of density estimation only focuses on modeling the joint distribution $p(\mathbf{x})$, in which important conditional dependencies between features are opaque. We propose a simple and general framework, coined Posterior Matching, that enables any Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to perform arbitrary conditioning, without modification to the VAE itself. Posterior Matching applies to the numerous existing VAE-based approaches to joint density estimation, thereby circumventing the specialized models required by previous approaches to arbitrary conditioning. We find that Posterior Matching achieves performance that is comparable or superior to current state-of-the-art methods for a variety of tasks.

(2 min) This paper demonstrates the systematic use of combinatorial coverage for selecting and characterizing test and training sets for machine learning models. The presented work adapts combinatorial interaction testing, which has been successfully leveraged in identifying faults in software testing, to characterize data used in machine learning. The MNIST hand-written digits data is used to demonstrate that combinatorial coverage can be used to select test sets that stress machine learning model performance, to select training sets that lead to robust model performance, and to select data for fine-tuning models to new domains. Thus, the results posit combinatorial coverage as a holistic approach to training and testing for machine learning. In contrast to prior work which has focused on the use of coverage in regard to the internal of neural networks, this paper considers coverage over simple features derived from inputs and outputs. Thus, this paper addresses the case where the supplier of test and training sets for machine learning models does not have intellectual property rights to the models themselves. Finally, the paper addresses prior criticism of combinatorial coverage and provides a rebuttal which advocates the use of coverage metrics in machine learning applications.

(7 min) Posted by Chelsea Finn, Research Adviser and Eric Jang, Senior Research Scientist, Robotics at Google People can flexibly maneuver objects in their physical surroundings to accomplish various goals. One of the grand challenges in robotics is to successfully train robots to do the same, i.e., to develop a general-purpose robot capable of performing a multitude of tasks based on arbitrary user commands. Robots that are faced with the real world will also inevitably encounter new user instructions and situations that were not seen during training. Therefore, it is imperative for robots to be trained to perform multiple tasks in a variety of situations and, more importantly, to be capable of solving new tasks as requested by human users, even if the robot was not explicitly trained on those t…

(7 min) In this article, I explain how to easily turn data into videos. Data animations add value to your presentations. They also constitute a useful tool in exploratory data analysis. Of course, as in any data visualization, carefully choice of what to put in your video, and how to format it, is critical. The technique described… Read More »Data Animation: Much Easier than you Think! The post Data Animation: Much Easier than you Think! appeared first on Data Science Central.

(2 min) From active noise cancellation to digital assistants that are always listening for your commands, audio is perhaps one of the most important but often overlooked aspects of modern technology in our daily lives. Audio Analytic has been using machine learning that enables a vast array of devices to make sense of the world of sound. Read article > The post How Audio Analytic Is Teaching Machines to Listen appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

(9 min) Technology trends and advancements in digital media in the past decade or so have resulted in the proliferation of text-based data. The potential benefits of mining this text to derive insights, both tactical and strategic, is enormous. This is called natural language processing (NLP). You can use NLP, for example, to analyze your product reviews […]

(6 min) Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that makes it faster for data scientists and engineers to prepare data for machine learning (ML) applications by using a visual interface. It contains over 300 built-in data transformations so you can quickly normalize, transform, and combine features without having to write any code. […]

(5 min) Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler makes it faster for data scientists and engineers to prepare data for machine learning (ML) applications by using a visual interface. Previously, when you created a Data Wrangler data flow, you could choose different export options to easily integrate that data flow into your data processing pipeline. Data Wrangler offers export […]

(4 min) Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that makes it faster for data scientists and engineers to prepare data for machine learning (ML) applications via a visual interface. Data preparation is a crucial step of the ML lifecycle, and Data Wrangler provides an end-to-end solution to import, prepare, transform, featurize, and […]

(2 min) imodels: A python package with cutting-edge techniques for concise, transparent, and accurate predictive modeling. All sklearn-compatible and easy to use. Recent machine-learning advances have led to increasingly complex predictive models, often at the cost of interpretability. We often need interpretability, particularly in high-stakes applications such as medicine, biology, and political science (see here and here for an overview). Moreover, interpretable models help with all kinds of things, such as identifying errors, leveraging domain knowledge, and speeding up inference. Despite new advances in formulating/fitting interpretable models, implementations are often difficult to find, use, and compare. imodels (github, paper) fills this gap by providing a simple unified interface and im…

(8 min) We built a neural theorem prover for Lean that learned to solve a variety of challenging high-school olympiad problems, including problems from the AMC12 and AIME competitions, as well as two problems adapted from the IMO.[1] The prover uses a language model to find proofs of formal statements. Each

(3 min) Hello! Today (February 1st) was my birthday, and I spent a great deal of time pondering how to spend this year. In the end, I had two broad goals for the year: improving my skills and helping others. RL Weekly was something I have always been proud of. It not only gave me a reason to read many research papers but also rewarded me with many emails of appreciation, which I am still incredibly thankful for. Therefore, it was a natural decision to revive the newsletter this year. This issue marks the revival of RL News. Notice the name change from RL Weekly to RL News: the newsletter will have one issue every two weeks. Coincidentally, today is also Lunar New Year. If you celebrate it: Happy Lunar New Year!

(12 min) As the pandemic overburdens medical facilities and clinicians become increasingly overworked, the ability to make quick decisions on providing the best possible treatment is even more critical. In urgent health situations, such decisions can mean life or death. However, certain treatment protocols can pose a considerable risk to patients who have serious medical conditions and […] The post Using reinforcement learning to identify high-risk states and treatments in healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Research.

(1 min) Alias-free GAN more commonly known as StyleGAN3, the successor to the legendary StyleGAN2, came out last year, and … Well, and nothing really, despite the initial pique of interest and promising first results, StyleGAN3 did not set the world on fire, and the research community pretty quickly went back to the old but good StyleGAN2 for its well known latent space disentanglement and numerous other killer features, leaving its successor mostly in the shrinkwrap up on the bookshelf as an interesting, yet confusing toy. Now, some 6 months later the team at the Tel-Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Adobe Research finally released a comprehensive study of StyleGAN3’s applications in popular inversion and editing tasks, its pitfalls, and potential solutions, as well as highlights of the power of the Alias-free generator in tasks, where traditional image generators commonly underperform. Let’s dive in, and learn, shall we? Full summary: https://t.me/casual_gan/253 Blog post: https://www.casualganpapers.com/alias-free-gan-stylegan3-inversion-video-editing/Third-Time-Is-The-Charm-explained.html StyleGAN-3 Video Editing arxiv / code Subscribe to Casual GAN Papers and follow me on Twitter for weekly AI paper summaries! submitted by /u/KirillTheMunchKing [link] [comments]

(1 min) As regional-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) extract imagery from regions of interest (ROI), how are these regions identified? I'm assuming that they are identified when you annotate the imagery using a bounding box-creation tool such as LabelImg. Is this how ROIs are determined by the algorithm? submitted by /u/EnvironmentalLemon36 [link] [comments]

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(1 min) Hey everyone! I’m one of the creators of Sieve. I posted about it here a while back and thought I'd share that r/MachineLearning can now try it for free :) As a refresher... Sieve can process 24 hours of video in less than 10 minutes, and makes it easy to search video by detected objects / characteristics, motion data, and visual similarity. You can use our models out of the box, or plug-in your own model endpoints into our infrastructure. Every industry from security, to media, supply chain, construction, retail, sports, and agriculture is being transformed by video analytics—but setting up the infrastructure to process video data quickly is difficult. Having to deal with video ingestion pipelines, computer-vision model training, and search functionality is not pretty. Use Cases: https://sievedata.com/use-cases FAQ: https://sievedata.com/faq We’d love to hear what you think about all the updates, and ideas on how we can improve it. Thanks for taking the time to read this, we’re grateful to be posting here :) submitted by /u/happybirthday290 [link] [comments]

(1 min) Alias-free GAN more commonly known as StyleGAN3, the successor to the legendary StyleGAN2, came out last year, and … Well, and nothing really, despite the initial pique of interest and promising first results, StyleGAN3 did not set the world on fire, and the research community pretty quickly went back to the old but good StyleGAN2 for its well known latent space disentanglement and numerous other killer features, leaving its successor mostly in the shrinkwrap up on the bookshelf as an interesting, yet confusing toy. Now, some 6 months later the team at the Tel-Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Adobe Research finally released a comprehensive study of StyleGAN3’s applications in popular inversion and editing tasks, its pitfalls, and potential solutions, as well as highlights of the power of the Alias-free generator in tasks, where traditional image generators commonly underperform. Let’s dive in, and learn, shall we? Full summary: https://t.me/casual_gan/253 Blog post: https://www.casualganpapers.com/alias-free-gan-stylegan3-inversion-video-editing/Third-Time-Is-The-Charm-explained.html StyleGAN-3 Video Editing arxiv / code Subscribe to Casual GAN Papers and follow me on Twitter for weekly AI paper summaries! submitted by /u/KirillTheMunchKing [link] [comments]

(1 min) https://twitter.com/dr_nickiw/status/1489008426059456517?t=AahKcHt1yb5GpAzEMYK3jg&s=19 A black feminist Google employee is quiting her job because Google supposedly has a toxic culture. What are your thoughts on this? submitted by /u/tomd_96 [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hello everyone. I've been a machine learning engineer my whole career. I'm curious to see how the ML community looks for jobs in today's market. View Poll submitted by /u/prateek-infinity [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hi, I recently received a proposition to work on a project that is hypothesized as wanting to apply "ML based Clustering methods" as follows: Using clustering on legacy software - basically about separation of concerns - how do you isolate sections of monolithic applications so you can modernize or replace them a phased way. Are there any good resources for a head start, I fail to understand how one can go about applying Clustering on Legacy software and codes. Any suggestions? submitted by /u/Sufficient_Permit_77 [link] [comments]

(1 min) I'm wondering how commercial face beautify apps are doing things like that (the input is a 3d baby echography) ​ left 3d echography - Right filtered image Gynecological private clinics are using apps like facetune2 or picsart to enhance the face of the babies. It's a manual crafted process using different features but in the end, I think it's the result of a Gan Network because I see they added/invent hair or eyebrows (closed eyes of the baby) Is it possible to automatise this process, is it possible to train a Gan like stylegan with ffhq dataset, in example? ​ Thanks submitted by /u/monete2002 [link] [comments]

(1 min) DeepMind has recently introduced AlphaCode that can solve some problems from CodeForces, a website that hosts competitive programming contests. ​ Link: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Competitive-programming-with-AlphaCode submitted by /u/Serious-East784 [link] [comments]

(1 min) Active Learning Simplified with Rikai Hey, there, We (Eto.ai) are building an open-source unstructured ML data (image, video, sensor) framework, called Rikai, which features: SQL-ML capability (Bring your own model, BYOM) Support Pytorch / Tensorflow / Sklearn model inference via SQL Large scale feature engineering and GPU inference via Spark SQL backend Native tensor / numpy SerDe in the dataset Native Pytorch / Tensorflow / Pandas readers Semantic types for CV tasks 2d/3d bounding box, segmentations and etc Jupyter integration for visualization and JDBC integration Semantic types (Image, Video, Bounding box) can be directly rendered in Jupyter notebooks Use Looker / Mode Analytics to visualize the stats of your image and sensor dataset (via JDBC) The goal of this project is to empower everyone to analyze machine learning data at scale. Here is a demo: Active Learning Simplified with Rikai . It demonstrates how simple it is to use uncertainty sampling to achieve equivalent model accuracy while significantly reducing labeling cost. Github repo: https://github.com/eto-ai/rikai Would appreciate your feedbacks! submitted by /u/eddyxu [link] [comments]

(3 min) ​ Sold to Francisco Partners (private equity) for $1B IBM Sells Some Watson Health Assets for More Than $1 Billion - Bloomberg Watson was billed as the future of healthcare, but failed to deliver on its ambitious promises. "IBM agreed to sell part of its IBM Watson Health business to private equity firm Francisco Partners, scaling back the technology company’s once-lofty ambitions in health care. "The value of the assets being sold, which include extensive and wide-ranging data sets and products, and image software offerings, is more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the plans. IBM confirmed an earlier Bloomberg report on the sale in a statement on Friday, without disclosing the price." This is encouraging news for those who have sights set on the healthcare industry. Also a lesson for people to focus on smaller-scale products with limited scope. submitted by /u/the_scign [link] [comments]

(3 min) GPT-NeoX-20B, a 20 billion parameter model trained using EleutherAI's GPT-NeoX, was announced today. They will publicly release the weights on February 9th, which is a week from now. The model outperforms OpenAI's Curie in a lot of tasks. They have provided some additional info (and benchmarks) in their blog post, at https://blog.eleuther.ai/announcing-20b/. submitted by /u/MonLiH [link] [comments]

(1 min) There are advantages to using AWS, Azure, and GCP, but I'm wondering if anybody has experience with some of the smaller providers. Sometimes I don't need a comprehensive solution, I just need more power than my workstation can provide to train a model. I've stumbled upon several companies offering lower prices for powerful hardware, like DataCrunch.io and Lamba Labs. Are there are other smaller companies worth exploring? Have any of you used one of these providers? submitted by /u/TrueBirch [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hello everyone, I have issues training some self-supervised audio models and thought that maybe Reddit's swarm intelligence might help me here. I try to train the recently published data2vec model on music data (the FMA dataset). I've made some modifications to the feature extractor ConvNet, and reduced the size of the transformer encoder unit, but overall it is similar to the proposed model. Since I am new to training transformer models, I've tried to reproduce the paper's hyperparameters as closely as possible. My batch size is much smaller, so I've adjusted the learning rate accordingly etc.. The first few epochs seem promising. The loss goes down quite quickly and the embedding variance of the teacher and student models increase over time (i.e. the model is not collapsing to a constant representation). However, after a while it abruptly changes and the loss goes up again and stays high over the remaining training (the variances stay high though). I've also experienced a similar issue with another exponential moving average (EMA) model, DINO (the ResNet variant), a while ago. When reducing the learning rate, the effect just happend later. Does anyone have an idea why this might be happening? submitted by /u/Tomsen1410 [link] [comments]

(3 min) Are there any easy templates or systems that you use to make your projects more presentable? I'm not much of a UI guy and don't want to spend too much time diving deep into JavaScript to figure out how to put a UI together to make my projects more presentable. Is there anything you all use that doesn't require building too much from scratch? Thanks in advance. submitted by /u/AveliaUsum [link] [comments]

(0 min) What is the current state of the art architecture (which layers) when using Normalizing Flows for Variational inference? submitted by /u/future_gcp_poweruser [link] [comments]

(1 min) I've been thinking about developing a tool that would help to transform the graph DB data into a Pytorch dataset and use it with a custom model. Are there some red flags that I should have in mind regarding this tight coupling between ML and DB? submitted by /u/InGraphsWeTrust [link] [comments]

(0 min) I am working on an object detection project to identify White Flies and Aphids. I have found some dataset but no annotation is available [(xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax) or a mask]. Anyone worked with these pests that can provide some insight about a dataset? submitted by /u/giakou4 [link] [comments]

(0 min) Is there any simple way to download the exemplar images of ImageNet data for each class? It would be 1,000 images in total, maybe a little more. submitted by /u/Standard_Tank_9545 [link] [comments]

(2 min) Cruise, the self-driving company backed by General Motors and Honda, announced a public waitlist for its robotaxi service in San Francisco. It’s a significant step for the company that has previously been beset by delays in its quest to get paying customers into its autonomous ride-hailing vehicles. (https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/1/22912553/cruise-public-waitlist-robotaxi-autonomous-san-francisco) This has sparked some debate about the future of self-driving neural network hardware and machine learning pipeline. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167037) submitted by /u/hardmaru [link] [comments]

(1 min) Project website, with a short summary video: https://sites.google.com/view/stylegan-xl/ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00273 Abstract Computer graphics has experienced a recent surge of data-centric approaches for photorealistic and controllable content creation. StyleGAN in particular sets new standards for generative modeling regarding image quality and controllability. However, StyleGAN's performance severely degrades on large unstructured datasets such as ImageNet. StyleGAN was designed for controllability; hence, prior works suspect its restrictive design to be unsuitable for diverse datasets. In contrast, we find the main limiting factor to be the current training strategy. Following the recently introduced Projected GAN paradigm, we leverage powerful neural network priors and a progressive growing strategy to successfully train the latest StyleGAN3 generator on ImageNet. Our final model, StyleGAN-XL, sets a new state-of-the-art on large-scale image synthesis and is the first to generate images at a resolution of 1024² at such a dataset scale. We demonstrate that this model can invert and edit images beyond the narrow domain of portraits or specific object classes. submitted by /u/hardmaru [link] [comments]

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(2 min) I would like to ask about your opinion on using ray[rllib] for research. I'll give you a little background. I'm a Ph.D. student that started last year on the topic of RL and Safe Autonomous Driving. Until now, I was using self-developed basic algorithms to test my agents and environments, but this is long and time-consuming, especially if trying a lot of different algorithms and alternatives. Moreover, I need to use different simulators like Carla or SUMO, depending on the kind of project I'm working on. Finally, I also often try different algorithms modifications, modifying both the NN models used and the algorithm itself. So my question is: do you suggest starting using and learning ray[rllib] or it is not worth it? Why? submitted by /u/T-Style [link] [comments]

(1 min) I have started working on a very small problem in TF_agents where I want to utilize a dataset for offline learning. However, I can't seem to find any documentation on how to create the trajectories without using a Driver in the environment. How does one go about to turn the dataset into a format for the DQN training? submitted by /u/SemenJenner [link] [comments]

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(2 min) This paper presents a systematic study of the effects of hyperspectral pixel dimensionality reduction on the pixel classification task. We use five dimensionality reduction methods -- PCA, KPCA, ICA, AE, and DAE -- to compress 301-dimensional hyperspectral pixels. Compressed pixels are subsequently used to perform pixel classifications. Pixel classification accuracies together with compression method, compression rates, and reconstruction errors provide a new lens to study the suitability of a compression method for the task of pixel classification. We use three high-resolution hyperspectral image datasets, representing three common landscape types (i.e. urban, transitional suburban, and forests) collected by the Remote Sensing and Spatial Ecosystem Modeling laboratory of the University of Toronto. We found that PCA, KPCA, and ICA post greater signal reconstruction capability; however, when compression rates are more than 90\% these methods show lower classification scores. AE and DAE methods post better classification accuracy at 95\% compression rate, however their performance drops as compression rate approaches 97\%. Our results suggest that both the compression method and the compression rate are important considerations when designing a hyperspectral pixel classification pipeline.

(2 min) This work shows that value-aware model learning, known for its numerous theoretical benefits, is also practically viable for solving challenging continuous control tasks in prevalent model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. First, we derive a novel value-aware model learning objective by bounding the model-advantage i.e. model performance difference, between two MDPs or models given a fixed policy, achieving superior performance to prior value-aware objectives in most continuous control environments. Second, we identify the issue of stale value estimates in naively substituting value-aware objectives in place of maximum-likelihood in dyna-style model-based RL algorithms. Our proposed remedy to this issue bridges the long-standing gap in theory and practice of value-aware model learning by enabling successful deployment of all value-aware objectives in solving several continuous control robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks. Our results are obtained with minimal modifications to two popular and open-source model-based RL algorithms -- SLBO and MBPO, without tuning any existing hyper-parameters, while also demonstrating better performance of value-aware objectives than these baseline in some environments.

(2 min) Developing new drugs for target diseases is a time-consuming and expensive task, drug repurposing has become a popular topic in the drug development field. As much health claim data become available, many studies have been conducted on the data. The real-world data is noisy, sparse, and has many confounding factors. In addition, many studies have shown that drugs effects are heterogeneous among the population. Lots of advanced machine learning models about estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) have emerged in recent years, and have been applied to in econometrics and machine learning communities. These studies acknowledge medicine and drug development as the main application area, but there has been limited translational research from the HTE methodology to drug development. We aim to introduce the HTE methodology to the healthcare area and provide feasibility consideration when translating the methodology with benchmark experiments on healthcare administrative claim data. Also, we want to use benchmark experiments to show how to interpret and evaluate the model when it is applied to healthcare research. By introducing the recent HTE techniques to a broad readership in biomedical informatics communities, we expect to promote the wide adoption of causal inference using machine learning. We also expect to provide the feasibility of HTE for personalized drug effectiveness.

(2 min) We provide a new non-asymptotic analysis of distributed TD(0) with linear function approximation. Our approach relies on "one-shot averaging," where $N$ agents run local copies of TD(0) and average the outcomes only once at the very end. We consider two models: one in which the agents interact with an environment they can observe and whose transitions depends on all of their actions (which we call the global state model), and one in which each agent can run a local copy of an identical Markov Decision Process, which we call the local state model. In the global state model, we show that the convergence rate of our distributed one-shot averaging method matches the known convergence rate of TD(0). By contrast, the best convergence rate in the previous literature showed a rate which, according to the worst-case bounds given, could underperform the non-distributed version by $O(N^3)$ in terms of the number of agents $N$. In the local state model, we demonstrate a version of the linear time speedup phenomenon, where the convergence time of the distributed process is a factor of $N$ faster than the convergence time of TD(0). As far as we are aware, this is the first result rigorously showing benefits from parallelism for temporal difference methods.

(2 min) In recent times, deep neural networks achieved outstanding predictive performance on various classification and pattern recognition tasks. However, many real-world prediction problems have ordinal response variables, and this ordering information is ignored by conventional classification losses such as the multi-category cross-entropy. Ordinal regression methods for deep neural networks address this. One such method is the CORAL method, which is based on an earlier binary label extension framework and achieves rank consistency among its output layer tasks by imposing a weight-sharing constraint. However, while earlier experiments showed that CORAL's rank consistency is beneficial for performance, the weight-sharing constraint could severely restrict the expressiveness of a deep neural network. In this paper, we propose an alternative method for rank-consistent ordinal regression that does not require a weight-sharing constraint in a neural network's fully connected output layer. We achieve this rank consistency by a novel training scheme using conditional training sets to obtain the unconditional rank probabilities through applying the chain rule for conditional probability distributions. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method to utilize the ordinal target information, and the absence of the weight-sharing restriction improves the performance substantially compared to the CORAL reference approach.

(2 min) We study the problem of efficiently scaling ensemble-based deep neural networks for multi-step time series (TS) forecasting on a large set of time series. Current state-of-the-art deep ensemble models have high memory and computational requirements, hampering their use to forecast millions of TS in practical scenarios. We propose N-BEATS(P), a global parallel variant of the N-BEATS model designed to allow simultaneous training of multiple univariate TS forecasting models. Our model addresses the practical limitations of related models, reducing the training time by half and memory requirement by a factor of 5, while keeping the same level of accuracy in all TS forecasting settings. We have performed multiple experiments detailing the various ways to train our model and have obtained results that demonstrate its capacity to generalize in various forecasting conditions and setups.

(2 min) We show that using nearest neighbours in the latent space of autoencoders (AE) significantly improves performance of semi-supervised novelty detection in both single and multi-class contexts. Autoencoding methods detect novelty by learning to differentiate between the non-novel training class(es) and all other unseen classes. Our method harnesses a combination of the reconstructions of the nearest neighbours and the latent-neighbour distances of a given input's latent representation. We demonstrate that our nearest-latent-neighbours (NLN) algorithm is memory and time efficient, does not require significant data augmentation, nor is reliant on pre-trained networks. Furthermore, we show that the NLN-algorithm is easily applicable to multiple datasets without modification. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is agnostic to autoencoder architecture and reconstruction error method. We validate our method across several standard datasets for a variety of different autoencoding architectures such as vanilla, adversarial and variational autoencoders using either reconstruction, residual or feature consistent losses. The results show that the NLN algorithm grants up to a 17% increase in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (AUROC) curve performance for the multi-class case and 8% for single-class novelty detection.

(2 min) The performance of a cross-sectional currency strategy depends crucially on accurately ranking instruments prior to portfolio construction. While this ranking step is traditionally performed using heuristics, or by sorting the outputs produced by pointwise regression or classification techniques, strategies using Learning to Rank algorithms have recently presented themselves as competitive and viable alternatives. Although the rankers at the core of these strategies are learned globally and improve ranking accuracy on average, they ignore the differences between the distributions of asset features over the times when the portfolio is rebalanced. This flaw renders them susceptible to producing sub-optimal rankings, possibly at important periods when accuracy is actually needed the most. For example, this might happen during critical risk-off episodes, which consequently exposes the portfolio to substantial, unwanted drawdowns. We tackle this shortcoming with an analogous idea from information retrieval: that a query's top retrieved documents or the local ranking context provide vital information about the query's own characteristics, which can then be used to refine the initial ranked list. In this work, we use a context-aware Learning-to-rank model that is based on the Transformer architecture to encode top/bottom ranked assets, learn the context and exploit this information to re-rank the initial results. Backtesting on a slate of 31 currencies, our proposed methodology increases the Sharpe ratio by around 30% and significantly enhances various performance metrics. Additionally, this approach also improves the Sharpe ratio when separately conditioning on normal and risk-off market states.

(2 min) Machine Learning operations is unarguably a very important and also one of the hottest topics in Artificial Intelligence lately. Being able to define very clear hypotheses for actual real-life problems that can be addressed by machine learning models, collecting and curating large amounts of data for model training and validation followed by model architecture search and actual optimization and finally presenting the results fits very well the scenario of Data Science experiments. This approach however does not supply the needed procedures and pipelines for the actual deployment of machine learning capabilities in real production grade systems. Automating live configuration mechanisms, on the fly adapting to live or offline data capture and consumption, serving multiple models in parallel either on edge or cloud architectures, addressing specific limitations of GPU memory or compute power, post-processing inference or prediction results and serving those either as APIs or with IoT based communication stacks in the same end-to-end pipeline are the real challenges that we try to address in this particular paper. In this paper we present a unified deployment pipeline and freedom-to-operate approach that supports all above requirements while using basic cross-platform tensor framework and script language engines.

(2 min) Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to numerically implement the proximal step. The most challenging step, in this setup, is to evaluate functions involving density explicitly, such as entropy, in terms of samples. This paper builds on the recent works with a slight but crucial difference: we propose to utilize a variational formulation of the objective function formulated as maximization over a parametric class of functions. Theoretically, the proposed variational formulation allows the construction of gradient flows directly for empirical distributions with a well-defined and meaningful objective function. Computationally, this approach replaces the computationally expensive step in existing methods, to handle objective functions involving density, with inner loop updates that only require a small batch of samples and scale well with the dimension. The performance and scalability of the proposed method are illustrated with the aid of several numerical experiments involving high-dimensional synthetic and real datasets.

(2 min) Distributed Mean Estimation (DME) is a central building block in federated learning, where clients send local gradients to a parameter server for averaging and updating the model. Due to communication constraints, clients often use lossy compression techniques to compress the gradients, resulting in estimation inaccuracies. DME is more challenging when clients have diverse network conditions, such as constrained communication budgets and packet losses. In such settings, DME techniques often incur a significant increase in the estimation error leading to degraded learning performance. In this work, we propose a robust DME technique named EDEN that naturally handles heterogeneous communication budgets and packet losses. We derive appealing theoretical guarantees for EDEN and evaluate it empirically. Our results demonstrate that EDEN consistently improves over state-of-the-art DME techniques.

(2 min) It is well understood that modern deep networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, conventional attack methods fail to produce adversarial perturbations that are intelligible to humans, and they pose limited threats in the physical world. To study feature-class associations in networks and better understand their vulnerability to attacks in the real world, we develop feature-level adversarial perturbations using deep image generators and a novel optimization objective. We term these feature-fool attacks. We show that they are versatile and use them to generate targeted feature-level attacks at the ImageNet scale that are simultaneously interpretable, universal to any source image, and physically-realizable. These attacks reveal spurious, semantically-describable feature/class associations that can be exploited by novel combinations of objects. We use them to guide the design of "copy/paste" adversaries in which one natural image is pasted into another to cause a targeted misclassification. Code is available at https://github.com/thestephencasper/feature_fool.

(2 min) Neural architecture search (NAS) has been an active direction of automatic machine learning (Auto-ML), aiming to explore efficient network structures. The searched architecture is evaluated by training on datasets with fixed data augmentation policies. However, recent works on auto-augmentation show that the suited augmentation policies can vary over different structures. Therefore, this work considers the possible coupling between neural architectures and data augmentation and proposes an effective algorithm jointly searching for them. Specifically, 1) for the NAS task, we adopt a single-path based differentiable method with Gumbel-softmax reparameterization strategy due to its memory efficiency; 2) for the auto-augmentation task, we introduce a novel search method based on policy gradient algorithm, which can significantly reduce the computation complexity. Our approach achieves 97.91% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 76.6% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset, showing the outstanding performance of our search algorithm.

(2 min) We introduce a deep generative model for image sequences that reliably factorise the latent space into content and motion variables. To model the diverse dynamics, we split the motion space into subspaces and introduce a unique Hamiltonian operator for each subspace. The Hamiltonian formulation provides reversible dynamics that constrain the evolution of the motion path along the low-dimensional manifold and conserves learnt invariant properties. The explicit split of the motion space decomposes the Hamiltonian into symmetry groups and gives long-term separability of the dynamics. This split also means we can learn content representations that are easy to interpret and control. We demonstrate the utility of our model by swapping the motion of two videos, generating long term sequences of various actions from a given image, unconditional sequence generation and image rotations.

(2 min) Stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) are the mathematical tool of choice for modelling spatiotemporal PDE-dynamics under the influence of randomness. Based on the notion of mild solution of an SPDE, we introduce a novel neural architecture to learn solution operators of PDEs with (possibly stochastic) forcing from partially observed data. The proposed Neural SPDE model provides an extension to two popular classes of physics-inspired architectures. On the one hand, it extends Neural CDEs and variants -- continuous-time analogues of RNNs -- in that it is capable of processing incoming sequential information arriving irregularly in time and observed at arbitrary spatial resolutions. On the other hand, it extends Neural Operators -- generalizations of neural networks to model mappings between spaces of functions -- in that it can parameterize solution operators of SPDEs depending simultaneously on the initial condition and a realization of the driving noise. By performing operations in the spectral domain, we show how a Neural SPDE can be evaluated in two ways, either by calling an ODE solver (emulating a spectral Galerkin scheme), or by solving a fixed point problem. Experiments on various semilinear SPDEs, including the stochastic Navier-Stokes equations, demonstrate how the Neural SPDE model is capable of learning complex spatiotemporal dynamics in a resolution-invariant way, with better accuracy and lighter training data requirements compared to alternative models, and up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than traditional solvers.

(2 min) Biclustering is the task of simultaneously clustering the rows and columns of the data matrix into different subgroups such that the rows and columns within a subgroup exhibit similar patterns. In this paper, we consider the case of producing block-diagonal biclusters. We provide a new formulation of the biclustering problem based on the idea of minimizing the empirical clustering risk. We develop and prove a consistency result with respect to the empirical clustering risk. Since the optimization problem is combinatorial in nature, finding the global minimum is computationally intractable. In light of this fact, we propose a simple and novel algorithm that finds a local minimum by alternating the use of an adapted version of the k-means clustering algorithm between columns and rows. We evaluate and compare the performance of our algorithm to other related biclustering methods on both simulated data and real-world gene expression data sets. The results demonstrate that our algorithm is able to detect meaningful structures in the data and outperform other competing biclustering methods in various settings and situations.

(2 min) Predictor screening rules, which discard predictors from the design matrix before fitting a model, have had considerable impact on the speed with which l1-regularized regression problems, such as the lasso, can be solved. Current state-of-the-art screening rules, however, have difficulties in dealing with highly-correlated predictors, often becoming too conservative. In this paper, we present a new screening rule to deal with this issue: the Hessian Screening Rule. The rule uses second-order information from the model to provide more accurate screening as well as higher-quality warm starts. The proposed rule outperforms all studied alternatives on data sets with high correlation for both l1-regularized least-squares (the lasso) and logistic regression. It also performs best overall on the real data sets that we examine.

(2 min) Recently, it has been observed that a transfer learning solution might be all we need to solve many few-shot learning benchmarks -- thus raising important questions about when and how meta-learning algorithms should be deployed. In this paper, we seek to clarify these questions by proposing a novel metric -- the diversity coefficient -- to measure the diversity of tasks in a few-shot learning benchmark. We hypothesize that the diversity coefficient of the few-shot learning benchmark is predictive of whether meta-learning solutions will succeed or not. Using the diversity coefficient, we show that the MiniImagenet benchmark has zero diversity. This novel insight contextualizes claims that transfer learning solutions are better than meta-learned solutions. Specifically, we empirically find that a diversity coefficient of zero correlates with a high similarity between transfer learning and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) learned solutions in terms of meta-accuracy (at meta-test time). Therefore, we conjecture meta-learned solutions have the same meta-test performance as transfer learning when the diversity coefficient is zero. Our work provides the first test of whether diversity correlates with meta-learning success.

(2 min) We propose a graph neural network (GNN)-based method to predict the distribution of penalties induced by outages in communication networks, where connections are protected by resources shared between working and backup paths. The GNN-based algorithm is trained only with random graphs generated with the Barab\'asi-Albert model. Even though, the obtained test results show that we can precisely model the penalties in a wide range of various existing topologies. GNNs eliminate the need to simulate complex outage scenarios for the network topologies under study. In practice, the whole design operation is limited by 4ms on modern hardware. This way, we can gain as much as over 12,000 times in the speed improvement.

(2 min) Recent self-supervised methods for image representation learning are based on maximizing the agreement between embedding vectors from different views of the same image. A trivial solution is obtained when the encoder outputs constant vectors. This collapse problem is often avoided through implicit biases in the learning architecture, that often lack a clear justification or interpretation. In this paper, we introduce VICReg (Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization), a method that explicitly avoids the collapse problem with a simple regularization term on the variance of the embeddings along each dimension individually. VICReg combines the variance term with a decorrelation mechanism based on redundancy reduction and covariance regularization, and achieves results on par with the state of the art on several downstream tasks. In addition, we show that incorporating our new variance term into other methods helps stabilize the training and leads to performance improvements.

(2 min) Most data is automatically collected and only ever "seen" by algorithms. Yet, data compressors preserve perceptual fidelity rather than just the information needed by algorithms performing downstream tasks. In this paper, we characterize the bit-rate required to ensure high performance on all predictive tasks that are invariant under a set of transformations, such as data augmentations. Based on our theory, we design unsupervised objectives for training neural compressors. Using these objectives, we train a generic image compressor that achieves substantial rate savings (more than $1000\times$ on ImageNet) compared to JPEG on 8 datasets, without decreasing downstream classification performance.

(2 min) Besides the Laplace distribution and the Gaussian distribution, there are many more probability distributions that are not well-understood in terms of privacy-preserving property -- one of which is the Dirichlet distribution. In this work, we study the inherent privacy of releasing a single draw from a Dirichlet posterior distribution (the Dirichlet posterior sampling). As our main result, we provide a simple privacy guarantee of the Dirichlet posterior sampling with the framework of R\'enyi Differential Privacy (RDP). Consequently, the RDP guarantee allows us to derive a simpler form of the $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy guarantee compared to those from the previous work. As an application, we use the RDP guarantee to derive a utility guarantee of the Dirichlet posterior sampling for privately releasing a normalized histogram, which is confirmed by our experimental results. Moreover, we demonstrate that the RDP guarantee can be used to track the privacy loss in Bayesian reinforcement learning.

(2 min) Predicting the stock market trend has always been challenging since its movement is affected by many factors. Here, we approach the future trend prediction problem as a machine learning classification problem by creating tomorrow_trend feature as our label to be predicted. Different features are given to help the machine learning model predict the label of a given day; whether it is an uptrend or downtrend, those features are technical indicators generated from the stock's price history. In addition, as financial news plays a vital role in changing the investor's behavior, the overall sentiment score on a given day is created from all news released on that day and added to the model as another feature. Three different machine learning models are tested in Spark (big-data computing platform), Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting Machine. Random Forest was the best performing model with a 63.58% test accuracy.

(2 min) We study approximation of probability measures supported on $n$-dimensional manifolds embedded in R^m by injective flows -- neural networks composed of invertible flows and injective layers. We show that in general, injective flows between R^n and R^m universally approximate measures supported on images of extendable embeddings, which are a subset of standard embeddings: when the embedding dimension m is small, topological obstructions may preclude certain manifolds as admissible targets. When the embedding dimension is sufficiently large, m \geq 3n+1, we use an argument from algebraic topology known as the clean trick to prove that the topological obstructions vanish and injective flows universally approximate any differentiable embedding. Along the way we show that the studied injective flows admit efficient projections on the range, and that their optimality can be established "in reverse," resolving a conjecture made in Brehmer and Cranmer 2020

(2 min) Emerging from low-level vision theory, steerable filters found their counterpart in prior work on steerable convolutional neural networks equivariant to rigid transformations. In our work, we propose a steerable feed-forward learning-based approach that consists of neurons with spherical decision surfaces and operates on point clouds. Such spherical neurons are obtained by conformal embedding of Euclidean space and have recently been revisited in the context of learning representations of point sets. Focusing on 3D geometry, we exploit the isometry property of spherical neurons and derive a 3D steerability constraint. After training spherical neurons to classify point clouds in a canonical orientation, we use a tetrahedron basis to quadruplicate the neurons and construct rotation-equivariant spherical filter banks. We then apply the derived constraint to interpolate the filter bank outputs and, thus, obtain a rotation-invariant network. Finally, we use a synthetic point set and real-world 3D skeleton data to verify our theoretical findings.

(2 min) We propose a hybrid method for generating arbitrage-free implied volatility (IV) surfaces consistent with historical data by combining model-free Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with continuous time stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven models. We focus on two classes of SDE models: regime switching models and L\'evy additive processes. By projecting historical surfaces onto the space of SDE model parameters, we obtain a distribution on the parameter subspace faithful to the data on which we then train a VAE. Arbitrage-free IV surfaces are then generated by sampling from the posterior distribution on the latent space, decoding to obtain SDE model parameters, and finally mapping those parameters to IV surfaces. We further refine the VAE model by including conditional features and demonstrate its superior generative out-of-sample performance.

(2 min) Restless and collapsing bandits are often used to model budget-constrained resource allocation in settings where arms have action-dependent transition probabilities, such as the allocation of health interventions among patients. However, state-of-the-art Whittle-index-based approaches to this planning problem either do not consider fairness among arms, or incentivize fairness without guaranteeing it. We thus introduce ProbFair, a probabilistically fair policy that maximizes total expected reward and satisfies the budget constraint while ensuring a strictly positive lower bound on the probability of being pulled at each timestep. We evaluate our algorithm on a real-world application, where interventions support continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy adherence among patients, as well as on a broader class of synthetic transition matrices. We find that ProbFair preserves utility while providing fairness guarantees.

(2 min) In recent years, algebraic topology and its modern development, the theory of persistent homology, has shown great potential in graph representation learning. In this paper, based on the mathematics of algebraic topology, we propose a novel solution for inductive relation prediction, an important learning task for knowledge graph completion. To predict the relation between two entities, one can use the existence of rules, namely a sequence of relations. Previous works view rules as paths and primarily focus on the searching of paths between entities. The space of rules is huge, and one has to sacrifice either efficiency or accuracy. In this paper, we consider rules as cycles and show that the space of cycles has a unique structure based on the mathematics of algebraic topology. By exploring the linear structure of the cycle space, we can improve the searching efficiency of rules. We propose to collect cycle bases that span the space of cycles. We build a novel GNN framework on the collected cycles to learn the representations of cycles, and to predict the existence/non-existence of a relation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.

(2 min) Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving paradigm where multiple participants jointly solve a machine learning problem without sharing raw data. Unlike traditional distributed learning, a unique characteristic of FL is statistical heterogeneity, namely, data distributions across participants are different from each other. Meanwhile, recent advances in the interpretation of neural networks have seen a wide use of neural tangent kernels (NTKs) for convergence analyses. In this paper, we propose a novel FL paradigm empowered by the NTK framework. The paradigm addresses the challenge of statistical heterogeneity by transmitting update data that are more expressive than those of the conventional FL paradigms. Specifically, sample-wise Jacobian matrices, rather than model weights/gradients, are uploaded by participants. The server then constructs an empirical kernel matrix to update a global model without explicitly performing gradient descent. We further develop a variant with improved communication efficiency and enhanced privacy. Numerical results show that the proposed paradigm can achieve the same accuracy while reducing the number of communication rounds by an order of magnitude compared to federated averaging.

(2 min) Machine learning models can leak information about the data used to train them. To mitigate this issue, Differentially Private (DP) variants of optimization algorithms like Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) have been designed to trade-off utility for privacy in Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) problems. In this paper, we propose Differentially Private proximal Coordinate Descent (DP-CD), a new method to solve composite DP-ERM problems. We derive utility guarantees through a novel theoretical analysis of inexact coordinate descent. Our results show that, thanks to larger step sizes, DP-CD can exploit imbalance in gradient coordinates to outperform DP-SGD. We also prove new lower bounds for composite DP-ERM under coordinate-wise regularity assumptions, that are nearly matched by DP-CD. For practical implementations, we propose to clip gradients using coordinate-wise thresholds that emerge from our theory, avoiding costly hyperparameter tuning. Experiments on real and synthetic data support our results, and show that DP-CD compares favorably with DP-SGD.

(2 min) Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) proposes to solve difficult tasks by performing decision-making and control at successively higher levels of temporal abstraction. However, off-policy HRL often suffers from the problem of non-stationary high-level policy since the low-level policy is constantly changing. In this paper, we propose a novel HRL approach for mitigating the non-stationarity by adversarially enforcing the high-level policy to generate subgoals compatible with the current instantiation of the low-level policy. In practice, the adversarial learning is implemented by training a simple discriminator network concurrently with the high-level policy which determines the compatibility level of subgoals. Experiments with state-of-the-art algorithms show that our approach improves both HRL learning efficiency and overall performance in various challenging continuous control tasks.

(2 min) Emotion recognition using EEG has been widely studied to address the challenges associated with affective computing. Using manual feature extraction method on EEG signals result in sub-optimal performance by the learning models. With the advancements in deep learning as a tool for automated feature engineering, in this work a hybrid of manual and automatic feature extraction method has been proposed. The asymmetry in the different brain regions are captured in a 2-D vector, termed as AsMap from the differential entropy (DE) features of EEG signals. These AsMaps are then used to extract features automatically using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. The proposed feature extraction method has been compared with DE and other DE-based feature extraction methods such as RASM, DASM and DCAU. Experiments are conducted using DEAP and SEED dataset on different classification problems based on number of classes. Results obtained indicate that the proposed method of feature extraction results in higher classification accuracy outperforming the DE based feature extraction methods. Highest classification accuracy of 97.10% is achieved on 3-class classification problem using SEED dataset. Further, the impact of window size on classification accuracy has also been assessed in this work.

(2 min) One of the biggest challenges in Federated Learning (FL) is that client devices often have drastically different computation and communication resources for local updates. To this end, recent research efforts have focused on training heterogeneous local models obtained by pruning a shared global model. Despite empirical success, theoretical guarantees on convergence remain an open question. In this paper, we present a unifying framework for heterogeneous FL algorithms with {\em arbitrary} adaptive online model pruning and provide a general convergence analysis. In particular, we prove that under certain sufficient conditions and on both IID and non-IID data, these algorithms converges to a stationary point of standard FL for general smooth cost functions, with a convergence rate of $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{Q}})$. Moreover, we illuminate two key factors impacting convergence: pruning-induced noise and minimum coverage index, advocating a joint design of local pruning masks for efficient training.

(2 min) Causal Optimal Transport (COT) results from imposing a temporal causality constraint on classic optimal transport problems, which naturally generates a new concept of distances between distributions on path spaces. The first application of the COT theory for sequential learning was given in Xu et al. (2020), where COT-GAN was introduced as an adversarial algorithm to train implicit generative models optimized for producing sequential data. Relying on (Xu et al., 2020), the contribution of the present paper is twofold. First, we develop a conditional version of COT-GAN suitable for sequence prediction. This means that the dataset is now used in order to learn how a sequence will evolve given the observation of its past evolution. Second, we improve on the convergence results by working with modifications of the empirical measures via kernel smoothing due to (Pflug and Pichler (2016)). The resulting kernel conditional COT-GAN algorithm is illustrated with an application for video prediction.

(2 min) Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have known a tremendous success for many continuous generation tasks, especially in the field of image generation. However, for discrete outputs such as language, optimizing GANs remains an open problem with many instabilities, as no gradient can be properly back-propagated from the discriminator output to the generator parameters. An alternative is to learn the generator network via reinforcement learning, using the discriminator signal as a reward, but such a technique suffers from moving rewards and vanishing gradient problems. Finally, it often falls short compared to direct maximum-likelihood approaches. In this paper, we introduce Generative Cooperative Networks, in which the discriminator architecture is cooperatively used along with the generation policy to output samples of realistic texts for the task at hand. We give theoretical guarantees of convergence for our approach, and study various efficient decoding schemes to empirically achieve state-of-the-art results in two main NLG tasks.

(2 min) In many domains data is currently represented as graphs and therefore, the graph representation of this data becomes increasingly important in machine learning. Network data is, implicitly or explicitly, always represented using a graph shift operator (GSO) with the most common choices being the adjacency, Laplacian matrices and their normalisations. In this paper, a novel parametrised GSO (PGSO) is proposed, where specific parameter values result in the most commonly used GSOs and message-passing operators in graph neural network (GNN) frameworks. The PGSO is suggested as a replacement of the standard GSOs that are used in state-of-the-art GNN architectures and the optimisation of the PGSO parameters is seamlessly included in the model training. It is proved that the PGSO has real eigenvalues and a set of real eigenvectors independent of the parameter values and spectral bounds on the PGSO are derived. PGSO parameters are shown to adapt to the sparsity of the graph structure in a study on stochastic blockmodel networks, where they are found to automatically replicate the GSO regularisation found in the literature. On several real-world datasets the accuracy of state-of-the-art GNN architectures is improved by the inclusion of the PGSO in both node- and graph-classification tasks.

(0 min) This paper presents a model-agnostic ensemble approach for supervised learning. The proposed approach is based on a parametric version of Random Subspace, in which each base model is learned from a feature subset sampled according to a Bernoulli distribution. Parameter optimization is performed using gradient descent and is rendered tractable by using an importance sampling approach that circumvents frequent re-training of the base models after each gradient descent step. While the degree of randomization is controlled by a hyper-parameter in standard Random Subspace, it has the advantage to be automatically tuned in our parametric version. Furthermore, model-agnostic feature importance scores can be easily derived from the trained ensemble model.

(0 min) Sum-of-norms clustering is a popular convexification of $K$-means clustering. We show that, if the dataset is made of a large number of independent random variables distributed according to the uniform measure on the union of two disjoint balls of unit radius, and if the balls are sufficiently close to one another, then sum-of-norms clustering will typically fail to recover the decomposition of the dataset into two clusters. As the dimension tends to infinity, this happens even when the distance between the centers of the two balls is taken to be as large as $2\sqrt{2}$. In order to show this, we introduce and analyze a continuous version of sum-of-norms clustering, where the dataset is replaced by a general measure. In particular, we state and prove a local-global characterization of the clustering that seems to be new even in the case of discrete datapoints.

(0 min) Coarse-graining (CG) of molecular simulations simplifies the particle representation by grouping selected atoms into pseudo-beads and therefore drastically accelerates simulation. However, such CG procedure induces information losses, which makes accurate backmapping, i.e., restoring fine-grained (FG) coordinates from CG coordinates, a long-standing challenge. Inspired by the recent progress in generative models and equivariant networks, we propose a novel model that rigorously embeds the vital probabilistic nature and geometric consistency requirements of the backmapping transformation. Our model encodes the FG uncertainties into an invariant latent space and decodes them back to FG geometries via equivariant convolutions. To standardize the evaluation of this domain, we further provide three comprehensive benchmarks based on molecular dynamics trajectories. Extensive experiments show that our approach always recovers more realistic structures and outperforms existing data-driven methods with a significant margin.

(0 min) Learning from structured data is a core machine learning task. Commonly, such data is represented as graphs, which normally only consider (typed) binary relationships between pairs of nodes. This is a substantial limitation for many domains with highly-structured data. One important such domain is source code, where hypergraph-based representations can better capture the semantically rich and structured nature of code. In this work, we present HEAT, a neural model capable of representing typed and qualified hypergraphs, where each hyperedge explicitly qualifies how participating nodes contribute. It can be viewed as a generalization of both message passing neural networks and Transformers. We evaluate HEAT on knowledge base completion and on bug detection and repair using a novel hypergraph representation of programs. In both settings, it outperforms strong baselines, indicating its power and generality.

(0 min) Music and dance have always co-existed as pillars of human activities, contributing immensely to the cultural, social, and entertainment functions in virtually all societies. Notwithstanding the gradual systematization of music and dance into two independent disciplines, their intimate connection is undeniable and one art-form often appears incomplete without the other. Recent research works have studied generative models for dance sequences conditioned on music. The dual task of composing music for given dances, however, has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel extension, where we jointly model both tasks in a dual learning approach. To leverage the duality of the two modalities, we introduce an optimal transport objective to align feature embeddings, as well as a cycle consistency loss to foster overall consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our dual learning framework improves individual task performance, delivering generated music compositions and dance choreographs that are realistic and faithful to the conditioned inputs.

(0 min) Evaluating explanation techniques using human subjects is costly, time-consuming and can lead to subjectivity in the assessments. To evaluate the accuracy of local explanations, we require access to the true feature importance scores for a given instance. However, the prediction function of a model usually does not decompose into linear additive terms that indicate how much a feature contributes to the output. In this work, we suggest to instead focus on the log odds ratio (LOR) of the prediction function, which naturally decomposes into additive terms for logistic regression and naive Bayes. We demonstrate how we can benchmark different explanation techniques in terms of their similarity to the LOR scores based on our proposed approach. In the experiments, we compare prominent local explanation techniques and find that the performance of the techniques can depend on the underlying model, the dataset, which data point is explained, the normalization of the data and the similarity metric.

(0 min) Reliable uncertainty from deterministic single-forward pass models is sought after because conventional methods of uncertainty quantification are computationally expensive. We take two complex single-forward-pass uncertainty approaches, DUQ and SNGP, and examine whether they mainly rely on a well-regularized feature space. Crucially, without using their more complex methods for estimating uncertainty, a single softmax neural net with such a feature-space, achieved via residual connections and spectral normalization, *outperforms* DUQ and SNGP's epistemic uncertainty predictions using simple Gaussian Discriminant Analysis *post-training* as a separate feature-space density estimator -- without fine-tuning on OoD data, feature ensembling, or input pre-procressing. This conceptually simple *Deep Deterministic Uncertainty (DDU)* baseline can also be used to disentangle aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty and performs as well as Deep Ensembles, the state-of-the art for uncertainty prediction, on several OoD benchmarks (CIFAR-10/100 vs SVHN/Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet vs ImageNet-O) as well as in active learning settings across different model architectures, yet is *computationally cheaper*.

(0 min) We consider the problem of finding a compromise between the opinions of a group of individuals on a number of mutually independent, binary topics. In this paper, we quantify the loss in representativeness that results from requiring the outcome to have majority support, in other words, the "price of majority support". Each individual is assumed to support an outcome if they agree with the outcome on at least as many topics as they disagree on. Our results can also be seen as quantifying Anscombes paradox which states that topic-wise majority outcome may not be supported by a majority. To measure the representativeness of an outcome, we consider two metrics. First, we look for an outcome that agrees with a majority on as many topics as possible. We prove that the maximum number such that there is guaranteed to exist an outcome that agrees with a majority on this number of topics and has majority support, equals $\ceil{(t+1)/2}$ where $t$ is the total number of topics. Second, we count the number of times a voter opinion on a topic matches the outcome on that topic. The goal is to find the outcome with majority support with the largest number of matches. We consider the ratio between this number and the number of matches of the overall best outcome which may not have majority support. We try to find the maximum ratio such that an outcome with majority support and this ratio of matches compared to the overall best is guaranteed to exist. For 3 topics, we show this ratio to be $5/6\approx 0.83$. In general, we prove an upper bound that comes arbitrarily close to $2\sqrt{6}-4\approx 0.90$ as $t$ tends to infinity. Furthermore, we numerically compute a better upper and a non-matching lower bound in the relevant range for $t$.

(0 min) Modern vehicles, including autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles, are increasingly connected to the external world, which enables various functionalities and services. However, the improving connectivity also increases the attack surfaces of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), causing its vulnerabilities to cyber-threats. Due to the lack of authentication and encryption procedures in vehicular networks, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential approaches to protect modern vehicle systems from network attacks. In this paper, a transfer learning and ensemble learning-based IDS is proposed for IoV systems using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and hyper-parameter optimization techniques. In the experiments, the proposed IDS has demonstrated over 99.25% detection rates and F1-scores on two well-known public benchmark IoV security datasets: the Car-Hacking dataset and the CICIDS2017 dataset. This shows the effectiveness of the proposed IDS for cyber-attack detection in both intra-vehicle and external vehicular networks.

(0 min) Modern machine learning has achieved impressive prediction performance, but often sacrifices interpretability, a critical consideration in many problems. Here, we propose Fast Interpretable Greedy-Tree Sums (FIGS), an algorithm for fitting concise rule-based models. Specifically, FIGS generalizes the CART algorithm to simultaneously grow a flexible number of trees in a summation. The total number of splits across all the trees can be restricted by a pre-specified threshold, thereby keeping both the size and number of its trees under control. When both are small, the fitted tree-sum can be easily visualized and written out by hand, making it highly interpretable. A partially oracle theoretical result hints at the potential for FIGS to overcome a key weakness of single-tree models by disentangling additive components of generative additive models, thereby reducing redundancy from repeated splits on the same feature. Furthermore, given oracle access to optimal tree structures, we obtain L2 generalization bounds for such generative models in the case of C1 component functions, matching known minimax rates in some cases. Extensive experiments across a wide array of real-world datasets show that FIGS achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance (among all popular rule-based methods) when restricted to just a few splits (e.g. less than 20). We find empirically that FIGS is able to avoid repeated splits, and often provides more concise decision rules than fitted decision trees, without sacrificing predictive performance. All code and models are released in a full-fledged package on Github \url{https://github.com/csinva/imodels}.

(0 min) Detection of unwanted (`foreign') objects within products is a common procedure in many branches of industry for maintaining production quality. X-ray imaging is a fast, non-invasive and widely applicable method for foreign object detection. Deep learning has recently emerged as a powerful approach for recognizing patterns in radiographs (i.e., X-ray images), enabling automated X-ray based foreign object detection. However, these methods require a large number of training examples and manual annotation of these examples is a subjective and laborious task. In this work, we propose a Computed Tomography (CT) based method for producing training data for supervised learning of foreign object detection, with minimal labour requirements. In our approach, a few representative objects are CT scanned and reconstructed in 3D. The radiographs that have been acquired as part of the CT-scan data serve as input for the machine learning method. High-quality ground truth locations of the foreign objects are obtained through accurate 3D reconstructions and segmentations. Using these segmented volumes, corresponding 2D segmentations are obtained by creating virtual projections. We outline the benefits of objectively and reproducibly generating training data in this way compared to conventional radiograph annotation. In addition, we show how the accuracy depends on the number of objects used for the CT reconstructions. The results show that in this workflow generally only a relatively small number of representative objects (i.e., fewer than 10) are needed to achieve adequate detection performance in an industrial setting. Moreover, for real experimental data we show that the workflow leads to higher foreign object detection accuracies than with standard radiograph annotation.

(0 min) Real-time estimation of actual object depth is a module that is essential to performing various autonomous system tasks such as 3D reconstruction, scene understanding and condition assessment of machinery parts. During the last decade of machine learning, extensive deployment of deep learning methods to computer vision tasks has yielded approaches that succeed in achieving realistic depth synthesis out of a simple RGB modality. While most of these models are based on paired depth data or availability of video sequences and stereo images, methods for single-view depth synthesis in a fully unsupervised setting have hardly been explored. This study presents the most recent advances in the field of generative neural networks, leveraging them to perform fully unsupervised single-shot depth synthesis. Two generators for RGB-to-depth and depth-to-RGB transfer are implemented and simultaneously optimized using the Wasserstein-1 distance and a novel perceptual reconstruction term. To ensure that the proposed method is plausible, we comprehensively evaluate the models using industrial surface depth data as well as the Texas 3D Face Recognition Database and the SURREAL dataset that records body depth. The success observed in this study suggests the great potential for unsupervised single-shot depth estimation in real-world applications.

(0 min) Evolutionary algorithms have been used in the digital art scene since the 1970s. A popular application of genetic algorithms is to optimize the procedural placement of vector graphic primitives to resemble a given painting. In recent years, deep learning-based approaches have also been proposed to generate procedural drawings, which can be optimized using gradient descent. In this work, we revisit the use of evolutionary algorithms for computational creativity. We find that modern evolution strategies (ES) algorithms, when tasked with the placement of shapes, offer large improvements in both quality and efficiency compared to traditional genetic algorithms, and even comparable to gradient-based methods. We demonstrate that ES is also well suited at optimizing the placement of shapes to fit the CLIP model, and can produce diverse, distinct geometric abstractions that are aligned with human interpretation of language. Videos and demo: https://es-clip.github.io/

(0 min) Tractably modelling distributions over manifolds has long been an important goal in the natural sciences. Recent work has focused on developing general machine learning models to learn such distributions. However, for many applications these distributions must respect manifold symmetries -- a trait which most previous models disregard. In this paper, we lay the theoretical foundations for learning symmetry-invariant distributions on arbitrary manifolds via equivariant manifold flows. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by using it to learn gauge invariant densities over $SU(n)$ in the context of quantum field theory.

(0 min) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one of the major techniques in structural biology with over 11800 protein structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank. NMR can elucidate structures and dynamics of small and medium size proteins in solution, living cells, and solids, but has been limited by the tedious data analysis process. It typically requires weeks or months of manual work of trained expert to turn NMR measurements into a protein structure. Automation of this process is an open problem, formulated in the field over 30 years ago. Here, we present the first approach that addresses this challenge. Our method, ARTINA, uses as input only NMR spectra and the protein sequence, delivering a structure strictly without any human intervention. Tested on a 100-protein benchmark (1329 2D/3D/4D NMR spectra), ARTINA demonstrated its ability to solve structures with 1.44 {\AA} median RMSD to the PDB reference and 91.36% correct NMR resonance assignments. ARTINA can be used by non-experts, reducing the effort for a protein structure determination by NMR essentially to the preparation of the sample and the spectra measurements.

(0 min) Modern neural models trained on textual data rely on pre-trained representations that emerge without direct supervision. As these representations are increasingly being used in real-world applications, the inability to \emph{control} their content becomes an increasingly important problem. We formulate the problem of identifying and erasing a linear subspace that corresponds to a given concept, in order to prevent linear predictors from recovering the concept. We model this problem as a constrained, linear minimax game, and show that existing solutions are generally not optimal for this task. We derive a closed-form solution for certain objectives, and propose a convex relaxation, R-LACE, that works well for others. When evaluated in the context of binary gender removal, the method recovers a low-dimensional subspace whose removal mitigates bias by intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation. We show that the method -- despite being linear -- is highly expressive, effectively mitigating bias in deep nonlinear classifiers while maintaining tractability and interpretability.

(0 min) Policy learning is a quickly growing area. As robotics and computers control day-to-day life, their error rate needs to be minimized and controlled. There are many policy learning methods and bandit methods with provable error rates that accompany them. We show an error or regret bound and convergence of the Deep Epsilon Greedy method which chooses actions with a neural network's prediction. We also show that Epsilon Greedy method regret upper bound is minimized with cubic root exploration. In experiments with the real-world dataset MNIST, we construct a nonlinear reinforcement learning problem. We witness how with either high or low noise, some methods do and some do not converge which agrees with our proof of convergence.

(0 min) Nowadays the measure between heterogeneous data is still an open problem for cross-modal retrieval. The core of cross-modal retrieval is how to measure the similarity between different types of data. Many approaches have been developed to solve the problem. As one of the mainstream, approaches based on subspace learning pay attention to learning a common subspace where the similarity among multi-modal data can be measured directly. However, many of the existing approaches only focus on learning a latent subspace. They ignore the full use of discriminative information so that the semantically structural information is not well preserved. Therefore satisfactory results can not be achieved as expected. We in this paper propose a discriminative supervised subspace learning for cross-modal retrieval(DS2L), to make full use of discriminative information and better preserve the semantically structural information. Specifically, we first construct a shared semantic graph to preserve the semantic structure within each modality. Subsequently, the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion(HSIC) is introduced to preserve the consistence between feature-similarity and semantic-similarity of samples. Thirdly, we introduce a similarity preservation term, thus our model can compensate for the shortcomings of insufficient use of discriminative data and better preserve the semantically structural information within each modality. The experimental results obtained on three well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method against the compared classic subspace learning approaches.

(0 min) There have recently been significant advances in the accuracy of algorithms proposed for time series classification (TSC). However, a commonly asked question by real world practitioners and data scientists less familiar with the research topic, is whether the complexity of the algorithms considered state of the art is really necessary. Many times the first approach suggested is a simple pipeline of summary statistics or other time series feature extraction approaches such as TSFresh, which in itself is a sensible question; in publications on TSC algorithms generalised for multiple problem types, we rarely see these approaches considered or compared against. We experiment with basic feature extractors using vector based classifiers shown to be effective with continuous attributes in current state-of-the-art time series classifiers. We test these approaches on the UCR time series dataset archive, looking to see if TSC literature has overlooked the effectiveness of these approaches. We find that a pipeline of TSFresh followed by a rotation forest classifier, which we name FreshPRINCE, performs best. It is not state of the art, but it is significantly more accurate than nearest neighbour with dynamic time warping, and represents a reasonable benchmark for future comparison.

(0 min) We present a novel neural-networks-based algorithm to compute optimal transport maps and plans for strong and weak transport costs. To justify the usage of neural networks, we prove that they are universal approximators of transport plans between probability distributions. We evaluate the performance of our optimal transport algorithm on toy examples and on the unpaired image-to-image style translation task.

(0 min) In this paper, we present InSeGAN, an unsupervised 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for segmenting (nearly) identical instances of rigid objects in depth images. Using an analysis-by-synthesis approach, we design a novel GAN architecture to synthesize a multiple-instance depth image with independent control over each instance. InSeGAN takes in a set of code vectors (e.g., random noise vectors), each encoding the 3D pose of an object that is represented by a learned implicit object template. The generator has two distinct modules. The first module, the instance feature generator, uses each encoded pose to transform the implicit template into a feature map representation of each object instance. The second module, the depth image renderer, aggregates all of the single-instance feature maps output by the first module and generates a multiple-instance depth image. A discriminator distinguishes the generated multiple-instance depth images from the distribution of true depth images. To use our model for instance segmentation, we propose an instance pose encoder that learns to take in a generated depth image and reproduce the pose code vectors for all of the object instances. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new synthetic dataset, "Insta-10", consisting of 100,000 depth images, each with 5 instances of an object from one of 10 classes. Our experiments on Insta-10, as well as on real-world noisy depth images, show that InSeGAN achieves state-of-the-art performance, often outperforming prior methods by large margins.

(0 min) This work explores areas overlapping music, graph theory, and machine learning. An embedding representation of a node, in a weighted undirected graph $\mathcal{G}$, is a representation that captures the meaning of nodes in an embedding space. In this work, 383 Bach chorales were compiled and represented as a graph. Two application cases were investigated in this paper (i) learning node embedding representation using \emph{Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW), skip-gram}, and \emph{node2vec} algorithms, and (ii) learning node labels from neighboring nodes based on a collective classification approach. The results of this exploratory study ascertains many salient features of the graph-based representation approach applicable to music applications.

(0 min) Periodic graphs are graphs consisting of repetitive local structures, such as crystal nets and polygon mesh. Their generative modeling has great potential in real-world applications such as material design and graphics synthesis. Classical models either rely on domain-specific predefined generation principles (e.g., in crystal net design), or follow geometry-based prescribed rules. Recently, deep generative models has shown great promise in automatically generating general graphs. However, their advancement into periodic graphs have not been well explored due to several key challenges in 1) maintaining graph periodicity; 2) disentangling local and global patterns; and 3) efficiency in learning repetitive patterns. To address them, this paper proposes Periodical-Graph Disentangled Variational Auto-encoder (PGD-VAE), a new deep generative models for periodic graphs that can automatically learn, disentangle, and generate local and global graph patterns. Specifically, we develop a new periodic graph encoder consisting of global-pattern encoder and local-pattern encoder that ensures to disentangle the representation into global and local semantics. We then propose a new periodic graph decoder consisting of local structure decoder, neighborhood decoder, and global structure decoder, as well as the assembler of their outputs that guarantees periodicity. Moreover, we design a new model learning objective that helps ensure the invariance of local-semantic representations for the graphs with the same local structure. Comprehensive experimental evaluations have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code of proposed PGD-VAE is availabe at https://github.com/shi-yu-wang/PGD-VAE.

(0 min) By trade we usually mean the exchange of goods between states and countries. International trade acts as a barometer of the economic prosperity index and every country is overly dependent on resources, so international trade is essential. Trade is significant to the global health crisis, saving lives and livelihoods. By collecting the dataset called "Effects of COVID19 on trade" from the state website NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, we have developed a sustainable prediction process on the effects of COVID-19 in world trade using a deep learning model. In the research, we have given a 180-day trade forecast where the ups and downs of daily imports and exports have been accurately predicted in the Covid-19 period. In order to fulfill this prediction, we have taken data from 1st January 2015 to 30th May 2021 for all countries, all commodities, and all transport systems and have recovered what the world trade situation will be in the next 180 days during the Covid-19 period. The deep learning method has received equal attention from both investors and researchers in the field of in-depth observation. This study predicts global trade using the Long-Short Term Memory. Time series analysis can be useful to see how a given asset, security, or economy changes over time. Time series analysis plays an important role in past analysis to get different predictions of the future and it can be observed that some factors affect a particular variable from period to period. Through the time series it is possible to observe how various economic changes or trade effects change over time. By reviewing these changes, one can be aware of the steps to be taken in the future and a country can be more careful in terms of imports and exports accordingly. From our time series analysis, it can be said that the LSTM model has given a very gracious thought of the future world import and export situation in terms of trade.

(0 min) We focus on parameterized policy search for reinforcement learning over continuous action spaces. Typically, one assumes the score function associated with a policy is bounded, which {fails to hold even for Gaussian policies. } To properly address this issue, one must introduce an exploration tolerance parameter to quantify the region in which it is bounded. Doing so incurs a persistent bias that appears in the attenuation rate of the expected policy gradient norm, which is inversely proportional to the radius of the action space. To mitigate this hidden bias, heavy-tailed policy parameterizations may be used, which exhibit a bounded score function, but doing so can cause instability in algorithmic updates. To address these issues, in this work, we study the convergence of policy gradient algorithms under heavy-tailed parameterizations, which we propose to stabilize with a combination of mirror ascent-type updates and gradient tracking. Our main theoretical contribution is the establishment that this scheme converges with constant step and batch sizes, whereas prior works require these parameters to respectively shrink to null or grow to infinity. Experimentally, this scheme under a heavy-tailed policy parameterization yields improved reward accumulation across a variety of settings as compared with standard benchmarks.

(0 min) Minimizing functionals in the space of probability distributions can be done with Wasserstein gradient flows. To solve them numerically, a possible approach is to rely on the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme which is analogous to the proximal scheme in Euclidean spaces. However, it requires solving a nested optimization problem at each iteration, and is known for its computational challenges, especially in high dimension. To alleviate it, very recent works propose to approximate the JKO scheme leveraging Brenier's theorem, and using gradients of Input Convex Neural Networks to parameterize the density (JKO-ICNN). However, this method comes with a high computational cost and stability issues. Instead, this work proposes to use gradient flows in the space of probability measures endowed with the sliced-Wasserstein (SW) distance. We argue that this method is more flexible than JKO-ICNN, since SW enjoys a closed-form differentiable approximation. Thus, the density at each step can be parameterized by any generative model which alleviates the computational burden and makes it tractable in higher dimensions.

(0 min) Enabling reinforcement learning (RL) agents to leverage a knowledge base while learning from experience promises to advance RL in knowledge intensive domains. However, it has proven difficult to leverage knowledge that is not manually tailored to the environment. We propose to use the subclass relationships present in open-source knowledge graphs to abstract away from specific objects. We develop a residual policy gradient method that is able to integrate knowledge across different abstraction levels in the class hierarchy. Our method results in improved sample efficiency and generalisation to unseen objects in commonsense games, but we also investigate failure modes, such as excessive noise in the extracted class knowledge or environments with little class structure.

(0 min) We present a novel multiple-source unsupervised model for text classification under domain shift. Our model exploits the update rates in document representations to dynamically integrate domain encoders. It also employs a probabilistic heuristic to infer the error rate in the target domain in order to pair source classifiers. Our heuristic exploits data transformation cost and the classifier accuracy in the target feature space. We have used real world scenarios of Domain Adaptation to evaluate the efficacy of our algorithm. We also used pretrained multi-layer transformers as the document encoder in the experiments to demonstrate whether the improvement achieved by domain adaptation models can be delivered by out-of-the-box language model pretraining. The experiments testify that our model is the top performing approach in this setting.

(0 min) Learning mapping between two function spaces has attracted considerable research attention. However, learning the solution operator of partial differential equations (PDEs) remains a challenge in scientific computing. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel pseudo-differential integral operator (PDIO) inspired by a pseudo-differential operator, which is a generalization of a differential operator and characterized by a certain symbol. We parameterize the symbol by using a neural network and show that the neural-network-based symbol is contained in a smooth symbol class. Subsequently, we prove that the PDIO is a bounded linear operator, and thus is continuous in the Sobolev space. We combine the PDIO with the neural operator to develop a pseudo-differential neural operator (PDNO) to learn the nonlinear solution operator of PDEs. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of the proposed model by using Burgers' equation, Darcy flow, and the Navier-Stokes equation. The results reveal that the proposed PDNO outperforms the existing neural operator approaches in most experiments.

(0 min) Discovering cause-effect from observational data is an important but challenging problem in science and engineering. In this work, a recently proposed brain inspired learning algorithm namely-\emph{Neurochaos Learning} (NL) is used for the classification of cause-effect from simulated data. The data instances used are generated from coupled AR processes, coupled 1D chaotic skew tent maps, coupled 1D chaotic logistic maps and a real-world prey-predator system. The proposed method consistently outperforms a five layer Deep Neural Network architecture for coupling coefficient values ranging from $0.1$ to $0.7$. Further, we investigate the preservation of causality in the feature extracted space of NL using Granger Causality (GC) for coupled AR processes and and Compression-Complexity Causality (CCC) for coupled chaotic systems and real-world prey-predator dataset. This ability of NL to preserve causality under a chaotic transformation and successfully classify cause and effect time series (including a transfer learning scenario) is highly desirable in causal machine learning applications.

(0 min) Alpa automates model-parallel training of large deep learning (DL) models by generating execution plans that unify data, operator, and pipeline parallelism. Existing model-parallel training systems either require users to manually create a parallelization plan or automatically generate one from a limited space of model parallelism configurations, which does not suffice to scale out complex DL models on distributed compute devices. Alpa distributes the training of large DL models by viewing parallelisms as two hierarchical levels: inter-operator and intra-operator parallelisms. Based on it, Alpa constructs a new hierarchical space for massive model-parallel execution plans. Alpa designs a number of compilation passes to automatically derive the optimal parallel execution plan in each independent parallelism level and implements an efficient runtime to orchestrate the two-level parallel execution on distributed compute devices. Our evaluation shows Alpa generates parallelization plans that match or outperform hand-tuned model-parallel training systems even on models they are designed for. Unlike specialized systems, Alpa also generalizes to models with heterogeneous architectures and models without manually-designed plans.

(0 min) Deep-learning (DL) algorithms are becoming the standard for processing ultrasound (US) fetal images. Despite a large number of survey papers already present in this field, most of them are focusing on a broader area of medical-image analysis or not covering all fetal US DL applications. This paper surveys the most recent work in the field, with a total of 145 research papers published after 2017. Each paper is analyzed and commented on from both the methodology and application perspective. We categorized the papers in (i) fetal standard-plane detection, (ii) anatomical-structure analysis, and (iii) biometry parameter estimation. For each category, main limitations and open issues are presented. Summary tables are included to facilitate the comparison among the different approaches. Publicly-available datasets and performance metrics commonly used to assess algorithm performance are summarized, too. This paper ends with a critical summary of the current state of the art on DL algorithms for fetal US image analysis and a discussion on current challenges that have to be tackled by researchers working in the field to translate the research methodology into the actual clinical practice.

(0 min) Noisy labels can impair the performance of deep neural networks. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a new method for filtering label noise. Unlike most existing methods relying on the posterior probability of a noisy classifier, we focus on the much richer spatial behavior of data in the latent representational space. By leveraging the high-order topological information of data, we are able to collect most of the clean data and train a high-quality model. Theoretically we prove that this topological approach is guaranteed to collect the clean data with high probability. Empirical results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts and is robust to a broad spectrum of noise types and levels.

(0 min) The goal of spoken language understanding (SLU) systems is to determine the meaning of the input speech signal, unlike speech recognition which aims to produce verbatim transcripts. Advances in end-to-end (E2E) speech modeling have made it possible to train solely on semantic entities, which are far cheaper to collect than verbatim transcripts. We focus on this set prediction problem, where entity order is unspecified. Using two classes of E2E models, RNN transducers and attention based encoder-decoders, we show that these models work best when the training entity sequence is arranged in spoken order. To improve E2E SLU models when entity spoken order is unknown, we propose a novel data augmentation technique along with an implicit attention based alignment method to infer the spoken order. F1 scores significantly increased by more than 11% for RNN-T and about 2% for attention based encoder-decoder SLU models, outperforming previously reported results.

(0 min) We consider a subclass of $n$-player stochastic games, in which players have their own internal state/action spaces while they are coupled through their payoff functions. It is assumed that players' internal chains are driven by independent transition probabilities. Moreover, players can only receive realizations of their payoffs but not the actual functions, nor can they observe each others' states/actions. Under some assumptions on the structure of the payoff functions, we develop efficient learning algorithms based on Dual Averaging and Dual Mirror Descent, which provably converge almost surely or in expectation to the set of $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium policies. In particular, we derive upper bounds on the number of iterates that scale polynomially in terms of the game parameters to achieve an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium policy. Besides Markov potential games and linear-quadratic stochastic games, this work provides another interesting subclass of $n$-player stochastic games that under some assumption provably admit polynomial-time learning algorithm for finding their $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium policies.

(0 min) Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put forward the hypothesis that they accomplish this by making optimal use of limited computational resources. We study this hypothesis by meta-learning reinforcement learning algorithms that sacrifice performance for a shorter description length. The emerging class of models captures human exploration behavior better than previously considered approaches, such as Boltzmann exploration, upper confidence bound algorithms, and Thompson sampling. We additionally demonstrate that changes in description length produce the intended effects: reducing description length captures the behavior of brain-lesioned patients while increasing it echoes cognitive development during adolescence.

(0 min) M\"{o}bius transformations play an important role in both geometry and spherical image processing -- they are the group of conformal automorphisms of 2D surfaces and the spherical equivalent of homographies. Here we present a novel, M\"{o}bius-equivariant spherical convolution operator which we call M\"{o}bius convolution, and with it, develop the foundations for M\"{o}bius-equivariant spherical CNNs. Our approach is based on a simple observation: to achieve equivariance, we only need to consider the lower-dimensional subgroup which transforms the positions of points as seen in the frames of their neighbors. To efficiently compute M\"{o}bius convolutions at scale we derive an approximation of the action of the transformations on spherical filters, allowing us to compute our convolutions in the spectral domain with the fast Spherical Harmonic Transform. The resulting framework is both flexible and descriptive, and we demonstrate its utility by achieving promising results in both shape classification and image segmentation tasks.

(0 min) For stochastic models with intractable likelihood functions, approximate Bayesian computation offers a way of approximating the true posterior through repeated comparisons of observations with simulated model outputs in terms of a small set of summary statistics. These statistics need to retain the information that is relevant for constraining the parameters but cancel out the noise. They can thus be seen as thermodynamic state variables, for general stochastic models. For many scientific applications, we need strictly more summary statistics than model parameters to reach a satisfactory approximation of the posterior. Therefore, we propose to use the inner dimension of deep neural network based Autoencoders as summary statistics. To create an incentive for the encoder to encode all the parameter-related information but not the noise, we give the decoder access to explicit or implicit information on the noise that has been used to generate the training data. We validate the approach empirically on two types of stochastic models.

(0 min) Researchers may use a sketch of data of size $m$ instead of the full sample of size $n$ sometimes to relieve computation burden, and other times to maintain data privacy. This paper considers the case when full sample estimation would have required the Eicker-Huber-White robust standard errors to account for heteroskedasticity. We show that random projections have a smoothing effect on the sketched data, with the consequence that the least squares estimates using such sketched data behave 'as if' the errors were homoskedastic. This result is obtained by expressing the difference between the moments computed from the full sample and the sketched data as a degenerate $U$-statistic which is asymptotically normal with a homoskedastic variance when the conditions in Hall (1984) are satisfied. This result also holds for two-stage least squares for which algorithmic and statistical properties are analyzed. Sketches produced by random sampling will not, however, have the effect of homogenizing the error variances.

(0 min) Despite the state-of-the-art performance of deep convolutional neural networks, they are susceptible to bias and malfunction in unseen situations. The complex computation behind their reasoning is not sufficiently human-understandable to develop trust. External explainer methods have tried to interpret the network decisions in a human-understandable way, but they are accused of fallacies due to their assumptions and simplifications. On the other side, the inherent self-interpretability of models, while being more robust to the mentioned fallacies, cannot be applied to the already trained models. In this work, we propose a new attention-based pooling layer, called Local Attention Pooling (LAP), that accomplishes self-interpretability and the possibility for knowledge injection while improving the model's performance. Moreover, several weakly-supervised knowledge injection methodologies are provided to enhance the process of training. We verified our claims by evaluating several LAP-extended models on three different datasets, including Imagenet. The proposed framework offers more valid human-understandable and more faithful-to-the-model interpretations than the commonly used white-box explainer methods.

(0 min) Recent approaches of computer vision utilize deep learning methods as they perform quite well if training and testing domains follow the same underlying data distribution. However, it has been shown that minor variations in the images that occur when using these methods in the real world can lead to unpredictable errors. Transfer learning is the area of machine learning that tries to prevent these errors. Especially, approaches that augment image data using auxiliary knowledge encoded in language embeddings or knowledge graphs (KGs) have achieved promising results in recent years. This survey focuses on visual transfer learning approaches using KGs. KGs can represent auxiliary knowledge either in an underlying graph-structured schema or in a vector-based knowledge graph embedding. Intending to enable the reader to solve visual transfer learning problems with the help of specific KG-DL configurations we start with a description of relevant modeling structures of a KG of various expressions, such as directed labeled graphs, hypergraphs, and hyper-relational graphs. We explain the notion of feature extractor, while specifically referring to visual and semantic features. We provide a broad overview of knowledge graph embedding methods and describe several joint training objectives suitable to combine them with high dimensional visual embeddings. The main section introduces four different categories on how a KG can be combined with a DL pipeline: 1) Knowledge Graph as a Reviewer; 2) Knowledge Graph as a Trainee; 3) Knowledge Graph as a Trainer; and 4) Knowledge Graph as a Peer. To help researchers find evaluation benchmarks, we provide an overview of generic KGs and a set of image processing datasets and benchmarks including various types of auxiliary knowledge. Last, we summarize related surveys and give an outlook about challenges and open issues for future research.

(0 min) Despite advances in neural machine translation (NMT) quality, rare words continue to be problematic. For humans, the solution to the rare-word problem has long been dictionaries, but dictionaries cannot be straightforwardly incorporated into NMT. In this paper, we describe a new method for "attaching" dictionary definitions to rare words so that the network can learn the best way to use them. We demonstrate improvements of up to 1.8 BLEU using bilingual dictionaries.

(0 min) Persistent homology is a widely used theory in topological data analysis. In the context of graph learning, topological features based on persistent homology have been used to capture potentially high-order structural information so as to augment existing graph neural network methods. However, computing extended persistent homology summaries remains slow for large and dense graphs, especially since in learning applications one has to carry out this computation potentially many times. Inspired by recent success in neural algorithmic reasoning, we propose a novel learning method to compute extended persistence diagrams on graphs. The proposed neural network aims to simulate a specific algorithm and learns to compute extended persistence diagrams for new graphs efficiently. Experiments on approximating extended persistence diagrams and several downstream graph representation learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our method is also efficient; on large and dense graphs, we accelerate the computation by nearly 100 times.

(0 min) Parameter sharing, where each agent independently learns a policy with fully shared parameters between all policies, is a popular baseline method for multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, since all agents share the same policy network, they cannot learn different policies or tasks. This issue has been circumvented experimentally by adding an agent-specific indicator signal to observations, which we term "agent indication." Agent indication is limited, however, in that without modification it does not allow parameter sharing to be applied to environments where the action spaces and/or observation spaces are heterogeneous. This work formalizes the notion of agent indication and proves that it enables convergence to optimal policies for the first time. Next, we formally introduce methods to extend parameter sharing to learning in heterogeneous observation and action spaces, and prove that these methods allow for convergence to optimal policies. Finally, we experimentally confirm that the methods we introduce function empirically, and conduct a wide array of experiments studying the empirical efficacy of many different agent indication schemes for graphical observation spaces.

(0 min) Despite the long history of studying instant messaging usage, we know very little about how today's people participate in group chat channels and interact with others inside a real-world organization. In this short paper, we aim to update the existing knowledge on how group chat is used in the context of today's organizations. The knowledge is particularly important for the new norm of remote works under the COVID-19 pandemic. We have the privilege of collecting two valuable datasets: a total of 4,300 group chat channels in Slack from an R&D department in a multinational IT company; and a total of 117 groups' performance data. Through qualitative coding of 100 randomly sampled group channels from the 4,300 channels dataset, we identified and reported 9 categories such as Project channels, IT-Support channels, and Event channels. We further defined a feature metric with 21 meta features (and their derived features) without looking at the message content to depict the group communication style for these group chat channels, with which we successfully trained a machine learning model that can automatically classify a given group channel into one of the 9 categories. In addition to the descriptive data analysis, we illustrated how these communication metrics can be used to analyze team performance. We cross-referenced 117 project teams and their team-based Slack channels and identified 57 teams that appeared in both datasets, then we built a regression model to reveal the relationship between these group communication styles and the project team performance. This work contributes an updated empirical understanding of human-human communication practices within the enterprise setting, and suggests design opportunities for the future of human-AI communication experience.

(0 min) Attention mechanisms are dominating the explainability of deep models. They produce probability distributions over the input, which are widely deemed as feature-importance indicators. However, in this paper, we find one critical limitation in attention explanations: weakness in identifying the polarity of feature impact. This would be somehow misleading -- features with higher attention weights may not faithfully contribute to model predictions; instead, they can impose suppression effects. With this finding, we reflect on the explainability of current attention-based techniques, such as Attentio$\odot$Gradient and LRP-based attention explanations. We first propose an actionable diagnostic methodology (henceforth faithfulness violation test) to measure the consistency between explanation weights and the impact polarity. Through the extensive experiments, we then show that most tested explanation methods are unexpectedly hindered by the faithfulness violation issue, especially the raw attention. Empirical analyses on the factors affecting violation issues further provide useful observations for adopting explanation methods in attention models.

(0 min) It has been recognized that heavily overparameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit surprisingly good generalization performance in various machine-learning tasks. Although benefits of depth have been investigated from different perspectives such as the approximation theory and the statistical learning theory, existing theories do not adequately explain the empirical success of overparameterized DNNs. In this work, we report a remarkable interplay between depth and locality of a target function. We introduce $k$-local and $k$-global functions, and find that depth is beneficial for learning local functions but detrimental to learning global functions. This interplay is not properly captured by the neural tangent kernel, which describes an infinitely wide neural network within the lazy learning regime.

(0 min) Malicious agents in collaborative learning and outsourced data collection threaten the training of clean models. Backdoor attacks, where an attacker poisons a model during training to successfully achieve targeted misclassification, are a major concern to train-time robustness. In this paper, we investigate a multi-agent backdoor attack scenario, where multiple attackers attempt to backdoor a victim model simultaneously. A consistent backfiring phenomenon is observed across a wide range of games, where agents suffer from a low collective attack success rate. We examine different modes of backdoor attack configurations, non-cooperation / cooperation, joint distribution shifts, and game setups to return an equilibrium attack success rate at the lower bound. The results motivate the re-evaluation of backdoor defense research for practical environments.

(0 min) Spiking neural networks can compensate for quantization error by encoding information either in the temporal domain, or by processing discretized quantities in hidden states of higher precision. In theory, a wide dynamic range state-space enables multiple binarized inputs to be accumulated together, thus improving the representational capacity of individual neurons. This may be achieved by increasing the firing threshold, but make it too high and sparse spike activity turns into no spike emission. In this paper, we propose the use of `threshold annealing' as a warm-up method for firing thresholds. We show it enables the propagation of spikes across multiple layers where neurons would otherwise cease to fire, and in doing so, achieve highly competitive results on four diverse datasets, despite using binarized weights. Source code is available at https://github.com/jeshraghian/snn-tha/

(0 min) Inspired by the tremendous success of the self-attention mechanism in natural language processing, the Vision Transformer (ViT) creatively applies it to image patch sequences and achieves incredible performance. However, the scaled dot-product self-attention of ViT brings about scale ambiguity to the structure of the original feature space. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named Orthogonal Vision Transformer (O-ViT), to optimize ViT from the geometric perspective. O-ViT limits parameters of self-attention blocks to be on the norm-keeping orthogonal manifold, which can keep the geometry of the feature space. Moreover, O-ViT achieves both orthogonal constraints and cheap optimization overhead by adopting a surjective mapping between the orthogonal group and its Lie algebra.We have conducted comparative experiments on image recognition tasks to demonstrate O-ViT's validity and experiments show that O-ViT can boost the performance of ViT by up to 3.6%.

(0 min) The choices of hyperparameters have critical effects on the performance of machine learning models. In this paper, we present a general framework that is able to construct an adaptive optimizer, which automatically adjust the appropriate algorithm and parameters in the process of optimization. Examining the method of adaptive optimizer, we product an example of using genetic algorithm to construct an adaptive optimizer based on Bayesian Optimizer and compared effectiveness with original optimizer. Especially, It has great advantages in parallel optimization.

(0 min) Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying to safety-critical applications. Primal-dual as a prevalent constrained optimization framework suffers from instability issues and lacks optimality guarantees. This paper overcomes the issues from a novel probabilistic inference perspective and proposes an Expectation-Maximization style approach to learn safe policy. We show that the safe RL problem can be decomposed to 1) a convex optimization phase with a non-parametric variational distribution and 2) a supervised learning phase. We show the unique advantages of constrained variational policy optimization by proving its optimality and policy improvement stability. A wide range of experiments on continuous robotic tasks show that the proposed method achieves significantly better performance in terms of constraint satisfaction and sample efficiency than primal-dual baselines.

(0 min) Planning based on long and short term time series forecasts is a common practice across many industries. In this context, temporal aggregation and reconciliation techniques have been useful in improving forecasts, reducing model uncertainty, and providing a coherent forecast across different time horizons. However, an underlying assumption spanning all these techniques is the complete availability of data across all levels of the temporal hierarchy, while this offers mathematical convenience but most of the time low frequency data is partially completed and it is not available while forecasting. On the other hand, high frequency data can significantly change in a scenario like the COVID pandemic and this change can be used to improve forecasts that will otherwise significantly diverge from long term actuals. We propose a dynamic reconciliation method whereby we formulate the problem of informing low frequency forecasts based on high frequency actuals as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) allowing for the fact that we do not have complete information about the dynamics of the process. This allows us to have the best long term estimates based on the most recent data available even if the low frequency cycles have only been partially completed. The MDP has been solved using a Time Differenced Reinforcement learning (TDRL) approach with customizable actions and improves the long terms forecasts dramatically as compared to relying solely on historical low frequency data. The result also underscores the fact that while low frequency forecasts can improve the high frequency forecasts as mentioned in the temporal reconciliation literature (based on the assumption that low frequency forecasts have lower noise to signal ratio) the high frequency forecasts can also be used to inform the low frequency forecasts.

(0 min) Graphics processing units (GPUs) are the de facto standard for processing deep learning (DL) tasks. Meanwhile, GPU failures, which are inevitable, cause severe consequences in DL tasks: they disrupt distributed trainings, crash inference services, and result in service level agreement violations. To mitigate the problem caused by GPU failures, we propose to predict failures by using ML models. This paper is the first to study prediction models of GPU failures under large-scale production deep learning workloads. As a starting point, we evaluate classic prediction models and observe that predictions of these models are both inaccurate and unstable. To improve the precision and stability of predictions, we propose several techniques, including parallel and cascade model-ensemble mechanisms and a sliding training method. We evaluate the performances of our various techniques on a four-month production dataset including 350 million entries. The results show that our proposed techniques improve the prediction precision from 46.3\% to 84.0\%.

(0 min) We introduce an online convex optimization algorithm using projected subgradient descent with optimal adaptive learning rates, with sequential and efficient first-order updates. Our method provides a subgradient adaptive minimax optimal dynamic regret guarantee for a sequence of general convex functions with no known additional properties such as strong-convexity, smoothness, exp-concavity or even Lipschitz-continuity. The guarantee is against any comparator decision sequence with bounded "complexity", defined by the cumulative distance traveled via changes between successive decisions. We show optimality by generating a lower bound of the worst-case second-order dynamic regret, which incorporates actual subgradient norms and matches with our guarantees within a constant factor. We also derive the extension for independent learning in each decision coordinate separately. Additionally, we demonstrate how to best preserve our guarantees when the bound on total successive changes in the dynamic comparator sequence grows in time or the feedback regarding such bound arrives partially with time, both in a truly online manner. Then, as a major contribution, we examine the scenario when we receive no information regarding the successive changes, but instead, by a unique re-purposing of the expert mixture framework with novel additions, we eliminate the need of such information in, again, a truly online manner. Moreover, we show the ability to compete against all dynamic comparator sequences simultaneously (universally) with minimax optimality, where the guarantees depend on the "complexity" of each comparator separately. We also discuss potential modifications to our approach which addresses further complexity reductions for time, computation, memory, and we also further the universal competitiveness via guarantees taking into account concentrations of a comparator sequence in the decision set.

(0 min) Learning generalizeable policies from visual input in the presence of visual distractions is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning. Recently, there has been renewed interest in bisimulation metrics as a tool to address this issue; these metrics can be used to learn representations that are, in principle, invariant to irrelevant distractions by measuring behavioural similarity between states. An accurate, unbiased, and scalable estimation of these metrics has proved elusive in continuous state and action scenarios. We propose entangled bisimulation, a bisimulation metric that allows the specification of the distance function between states, and can be estimated without bias in continuous state and action spaces. We show how entangled bisimulation can meaningfully improve over previous methods on the Distracting Control Suite (DCS), even when added on top of data augmentation techniques.

(0 min) Traditional machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as multiple regression, require human analysts to make decisions on how to treat the data. These decisions can make the model building process subjective and difficult to replicate for those who did not build the model. Deep learning approaches benefit by allowing the model to learn what features are important once the human analyst builds the architecture. Thus, a method for automating certain human decisions for traditional ML modeling would help to improve the reproducibility and remove subjective aspects of the model building process. To that end, we propose to use shape metrics to describe 2D data to help make analyses more explainable and interpretable. The proposed approach provides a foundation to help automate various aspects of model building in an interpretable and explainable fashion. This is particularly important in applications in the medical community where the `right to explainability' is crucial. We provide various simulated data sets ranging from probability distributions, functions, and model quality control checks (such as QQ-Plots and residual analyses from ordinary least squares) to showcase the breadth of this approach.

(0 min) White Blood Cell (WBC) Leukaemia is detected through image-based classification. Convolutional Neural Networks are used to learn the features needed to classify images of cells a malignant or healthy. However, this type of model requires learning a large number of parameters and is difficult to interpret and explain. Explainable AI (XAI) attempts to alleviate this issue by providing insights to how models make decisions. Therefore, we present an XAI model which uses only 24 explainable and interpretable features and is highly competitive to other approaches by outperforming them by about 4.38\%. Further, our approach provides insight into which variables are the most important for the classification of the cells. This insight provides evidence that when labs treat the WBCs differently, the importance of various metrics changes substantially. Understanding the important features for classification is vital in medical imaging diagnosis and, by extension, understanding the AI models built in scientific pursuits.

(0 min) Learning curves are a concept from social sciences that has been adopted in the context of machine learning to assess the performance of a learning algorithm with respect to a certain resource, e.g. the number of training examples or the number of training iterations. Learning curves have important applications in several contexts of machine learning, most importantly for the context of data acquisition, early stopping of model training and model selection. For example, by modelling the learning curves, one can assess at an early stage whether the algorithm and hyperparameter configuration have the potential to be a suitable choice, often speeding up the algorithm selection process. A variety of approaches has been proposed to use learning curves for decision making. Some models answer the binary decision question of whether a certain algorithm at a certain budget will outperform a certain reference performance, whereas more complex models predict the entire learning curve of an algorithm. We contribute a framework that categorizes learning curve approaches using three criteria: the decision situation that they address, the intrinsic learning curve question that they answer and the type of resources that they use. We survey papers from literature and classify them into this framework.

(0 min) It is common practice in deep learning to represent a measurement of the world on a discrete grid, e.g. a 2D grid of pixels. However, the underlying signal represented by these measurements is often continuous, e.g. the scene depicted in an image. A powerful continuous alternative is then to represent these measurements using an implicit neural representation, a neural function trained to output the appropriate measurement value for any input spatial location. In this paper, we take this idea to its next level: what would it take to perform deep learning on these functions instead, treating them as data? In this context we refer to the data as functa, and propose a framework for deep learning on functa. This view presents a number of challenges around efficient conversion from data to functa, compact representation of functa, and effectively solving downstream tasks on functa. We outline a recipe to overcome these challenges and apply it to a wide range of data modalities including images, 3D shapes, neural radiance fields (NeRF) and data on manifolds. We demonstrate that this approach has various compelling properties across data modalities, in particular on the canonical tasks of generative modeling, data imputation, novel view synthesis and classification.

(0 min) Optimal transport tools (OTT-JAX) is a Python toolbox that can solve optimal transport problems between point clouds and histograms. The toolbox builds on various JAX features, such as automatic and custom reverse mode differentiation, vectorization, just-in-time compilation and accelerators support. The toolbox covers elementary computations, such as the resolution of the regularized OT problem, and more advanced extensions, such as barycenters, Gromov-Wasserstein, low-rank solvers, estimation of convex maps, differentiable generalizations of quantiles and ranks, and approximate OT between Gaussian mixtures. The toolbox code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/ott-jax/ott}

(0 min) We present a learning mechanism for reinforcement learning of closely related skills parameterized via a skill embedding space. Our approach is grounded on the intuition that nothing makes you learn better than a coevolving adversary. The main contribution of our work is to formulate an adversarial training regime for reinforcement learning with the help of entropy-regularized policy gradient formulation. We also adapt existing measures of causal attribution to draw insights from the skills learned. Our experiments demonstrate that the adversarial process leads to a better exploration of multiple solutions and understanding the minimum number of different skills necessary to solve a given set of tasks.

(0 min) In this paper, we investigate the evolution of autoencoders near their initialization. In particular, we study the distribution of the eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrices of autoencoders early in the training process, training on the MNIST data set. We find that autoencoders that have not been trained have eigenvalue distributions that are qualitatively different from those which have been trained for a long time ($>$100 epochs). Additionally, we find that even at early epochs, these eigenvalue distributions rapidly become qualitatively similar to those of the fully trained autoencoders. We also compare the eigenvalues at initialization to pertinent theoretical work on the eigenvalues of random matrices and the products of such matrices.

(0 min) Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the offline setting, but just as critical to data-efficient RL is the collection of informative data. The task-agnostic setting for data collection, where the task is not known a priori, is of particular interest due to the possibility of collecting a single dataset and using it to solve several downstream tasks as they arise. We investigate this setting via curiosity-based intrinsic motivation, a family of exploration methods which encourage the agent to explore those states or transitions it has not yet learned to model. With Explore2Offline, we propose to evaluate the quality of collected data by transferring the collected data and inferring policies with reward relabelling and standard offline RL algorithms. We evaluate a wide variety of data collection strategies, including a new exploration agent, Intrinsic Model Predictive Control (IMPC), using this scheme and demonstrate their performance on various tasks. We use this decoupled framework to strengthen intuitions about exploration and the data prerequisites for effective offline RL.

(0 min) We present You Only Cut Once (YOCO) for performing data augmentations. YOCO cuts one image into two pieces and performs data augmentations individually within each piece. Applying YOCO improves the diversity of the augmentation per sample and encourages neural networks to recognize objects from partial information. YOCO enjoys the properties of parameter-free, easy usage, and boosting almost all augmentations for free. Thorough experiments are conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. We first demonstrate that YOCO can be seamlessly applied to varying data augmentations, neural network architectures, and brings performance gains on CIFAR and ImageNet classification tasks, sometimes surpassing conventional image-level augmentation by large margins. Moreover, we show YOCO benefits contrastive pre-training toward a more powerful representation that can be better transferred to multiple downstream tasks. Finally, we study a number of variants of YOCO and empirically analyze the performance for respective settings. Code is available at GitHub.

(0 min) Decentralization is a promising method of scaling up parallel machine learning systems. In this paper, we provide a tight lower bound on the iteration complexity for such methods in a stochastic non-convex setting. Our lower bound reveals a theoretical gap in known convergence rates of many existing decentralized training algorithms, such as D-PSGD. We prove by construction this lower bound is tight and achievable. Motivated by our insights, we further propose DeTAG, a practical gossip-style decentralized algorithm that achieves the lower bound with only a logarithm gap. Empirically, we compare DeTAG with other decentralized algorithms on image classification tasks, and we show DeTAG enjoys faster convergence compared to baselines, especially on unshuffled data and in sparse networks.

(0 min) Image datasets are commonly used in psychophysical experiments and in machine learning research. Most publicly available datasets are comprised of images of realistic and natural objects. However, while typical machine learning models lack any domain specific knowledge about natural objects, humans can leverage prior experience for such data, making comparisons between artificial and natural learning challenging. Here, we introduce DELAUNAY, a dataset of abstract paintings and non-figurative art objects labelled by the artists' names. This dataset provides a middle ground between natural images and artificial patterns and can thus be used in a variety of contexts, for example to investigate the sample efficiency of humans and artificial neural networks. Finally, we train an off-the-shelf convolutional neural network on DELAUNAY, highlighting several of its intriguing features.

(0 min) We are interested in in silico evaluation methodology for molecular optimization methods. Given a sample of molecules and their properties of our interest, we wish not only to train an agent that can find molecules optimized with respect to the target property but also to evaluate its performance. A common practice is to train a predictor of the target property on the sample and use it for both training and evaluating the agent. We show that this evaluator potentially suffers from two biases; one is due to misspecification of the predictor and the other to reusing the same sample for training and evaluation. We discuss bias reduction methods for each of the biases comprehensively, and empirically investigate their effectiveness.

(0 min) The increasing application of machine learning techniques in everyday decision-making processes has brought concerns about the fairness of algorithmic decision-making. This paper concerns the problem of collider bias which produces spurious associations in fairness assessment and develops theorems to guide fairness assessment avoiding the collider bias. We consider a real-world application of auditing a trained classifier by an audit agency. We propose an unbiased assessment algorithm by utilising the developed theorems to reduce collider biases in the assessment. Experiments and simulations show the proposed algorithm reduces collider biases significantly in the assessment and is promising in auditing trained classifiers.

(0 min) Deep neural networks on 3D point cloud data have been widely used in the real world, especially in safety-critical applications. However, their robustness against corruptions is less studied. In this paper, we present ModelNet40-C, the first comprehensive benchmark on 3D point cloud corruption robustness, consisting of 15 common and realistic corruptions. Our evaluation shows a significant gap between the performances on ModelNet40 and ModelNet40-C for state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. To reduce the gap, we propose a simple but effective method by combining PointCutMix-R and TENT after evaluating a wide range of augmentation and test-time adaptation strategies. We identify a number of critical insights for future studies on corruption robustness in point cloud recognition. For instance, we unveil that Transformer-based architectures with proper training recipes achieve the strongest robustness. We hope our in-depth analysis will motivate the development of robust training strategies or architecture designs in the 3D point cloud domain. Our codebase and dataset are included in https://github.com/jiachens/ModelNet40-C

(0 min) In many real-world settings, only incomplete measurement data are available which can pose a problem for learning. Unsupervised learning of the signal model using a fixed incomplete measurement process is impossible in general, as there is no information in the nullspace of the measurement operator. This limitation can be overcome by using measurements from multiple operators. While this idea has been successfully applied in various applications, a precise characterization of the conditions for learning is still lacking. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting necessary and sufficient conditions for learning the signal model which indicate the interplay between the number of distinct measurement operators $G$, the number of measurements per operator $m$, the dimension of the model $k$ and the dimension of the signals $n$. In particular, we show that generically unsupervised learning is possible if each operator obtains at least $m>k+n/G$ measurements. Our results are agnostic of the learning algorithm and have implications in a wide range of practical algorithms, from low-rank matrix recovery to deep neural networks.

(0 min) Collaborative filtering is the de facto standard for analyzing users' activities and building recommendation systems for items. In this work we develop Sliced Anti-symmetric Decomposition (SAD), a new model for collaborative filtering based on implicit feedback. In contrast to traditional techniques where a latent representation of users (user vectors) and items (item vectors) are estimated, SAD introduces one additional latent vector to each item, using a novel three-way tensor view of user-item interactions. This new vector extends user-item preferences calculated by standard dot products to general inner products, producing interactions between items when evaluating their relative preferences. SAD reduces to state-of-the-art (SOTA) collaborative filtering models when the vector collapses to one, while in this paper we allow its value to be estimated from data. The proposed SAD model is simple, resulting in an efficient group stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. We demonstrate the efficiency of SAD in both simulated and real world datasets containing over 1M user-item interactions. By comparing SAD with seven alternative SOTA collaborative filtering models, we show that SAD is able to more consistently estimate personalized preferences.

(0 min) Motivation: Digitization of pathology laboratories through digital slide scanners and advances in deep learning approaches for objective histological assessment have resulted in rapid progress in the field of computational pathology (CPath) with wide-ranging applications in medical and pharmaceutical research as well as clinical workflows. However, the estimation of robustness of CPath models to variations in input images is an open problem with a significant impact on the down-stream practical applicability, deployment and acceptability of these approaches. Furthermore, development of domain-specific strategies for enhancement of robustness of such models is of prime importance as well. Implementation and Availability: In this work, we propose the first domain-specific Robustness Evaluation and Enhancement Toolbox (REET) for computational pathology applications. It provides a suite of algorithmic strategies for enabling robustness assessment of predictive models with respect to specialized image transformations such as staining, compression, focusing, blurring, changes in spatial resolution, brightness variations, geometric changes as well as pixel-level adversarial perturbations. Furthermore, REET also enables efficient and robust training of deep learning pipelines in computational pathology. REET is implemented in Python and is available at the following URL: https://github.com/alexjfoote/reetoolbox. Contact: Fayyaz.minhas@warwick.ac.uk

(2 min) Locally interpretable model agnostic explanations (LIME) method is one of the most popular methods used to explain black-box models at a per example level. Although many variants have been proposed, few provide a simple way to produce high fidelity explanations that are also stable and intuitive. In this work, we provide a novel perspective by proposing a model agnostic local explanation method inspired by the invariant risk minimization (IRM) principle -- originally proposed for (global) out-of-distribution generalization -- to provide such high fidelity explanations that are also stable and unidirectional across nearby examples. Our method is based on a game theoretic formulation where we theoretically show that our approach has a strong tendency to eliminate features where the gradient of the black-box function abruptly changes sign in the locality of the example we want to explain, while in other cases it is more careful and will choose a more conservative (feature) attribution, a behavior which can be highly desirable for recourse. Empirically, we show on tabular, image and text data that the quality of our explanations with neighborhoods formed using random perturbations are much better than LIME and in some cases even comparable to other methods that use realistic neighbors sampled from the data manifold. This is desirable given that learning a manifold to either create realistic neighbors or to project explanations is typically expensive or may even be impossible. Moreover, our algorithm is simple and efficient to train, and can ascertain stable input features for local decisions of a black-box without access to side information such as a (partial) causal graph as has been seen in some recent works.

(2 min) In recent years, understanding the implicit regularization of neural networks (NNs) has become a central task of deep learning theory. However, implicit regularization is in itself not completely defined and well understood. In this work, we make an attempt to mathematically define and study the implicit regularization. Importantly, we explore the limitation of a common approach of characterizing the implicit regularization by data-independent functions. We propose two dynamical mechanisms, i.e., Two-point and One-point Overlapping mechanisms, based on which we provide two recipes for producing classes of one-hidden-neuron NNs that provably cannot be fully characterized by a type of or all data-independent functions. Our results signify the profound data-dependency of implicit regularization in general, inspiring us to study in detail the data-dependency of NN implicit regularization in the future.

(2 min) Bayesian optimization over the latent spaces of deep autoencoder models (DAEs) has recently emerged as a promising new approach for optimizing challenging black-box functions over structured, discrete, hard-to-enumerate search spaces (e.g., molecules). Here the DAE dramatically simplifies the search space by mapping inputs into a continuous latent space where familiar Bayesian optimization tools can be more readily applied. Despite this simplification, the latent space typically remains high-dimensional. Thus, even with a well-suited latent space, these approaches do not necessarily provide a complete solution, but may rather shift the structured optimization problem to a high-dimensional one. In this paper, we propose LOL-BO, which adapts the notion of trust regions explored in recent work on high-dimensional Bayesian optimization to the structured setting. By reformulating the encoder to function as both an encoder for the DAE globally and as a deep kernel for the surrogate model within a trust region, we better align the notion of local optimization in the latent space with local optimization in the input space. LOL-BO achieves as much as 20 times improvement over state-of-the-art latent space Bayesian optimization methods across six real-world benchmarks, demonstrating that improvement in optimization strategies is as important as developing better DAE models.

(0 min) We implement a data assimilation framework for integrating ice surface and terminus position observations into a numerical ice-flow model. The model uses the well-known shallow shelf approximation (SSA) coupled to a level set method to capture ice motion and changes in the glacier geometry. The level set method explicitly tracks the evolving ice-atmosphere and ice-ocean boundaries for a marine outlet glacier. We use an Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter to assimilate observations of ice surface elevation and lateral ice extent by updating the level set function that describes the ice interface. Numerical experiments on an idealized marine-terminating glacier demonstrate the effectiveness of our data assimilation approach for tracking seasonal and multi-year glacier advance and retreat cycles. The model is also applied to simulate Helheim Glacier, a major tidewater-terminating glacier of the Greenland Ice Sheet that has experienced a recent history of rapid retreat. By assimilating observations from remotely-sensed surface elevation profiles we are able to more accurately track the migrating glacier terminus and glacier surface changes. These results support the use of data assimilation methodologies for obtaining more accurate predictions of short-term ice sheet dynamics.

(0 min) Bayesian Networks (BNs) have become a powerful technology for reasoning under uncertainty, particularly in areas that require causal assumptions that enable us to simulate the effect of intervention. The graphical structure of these models can be determined by causal knowledge, learnt from data, or a combination of both. While it seems plausible that the best approach in constructing a causal graph involves combining knowledge with machine learning, this approach remains underused in practice. We implement and evaluate 10 knowledge approaches with application to different case studies and BN structure learning algorithms available in the open-source Bayesys structure learning system. The approaches enable us to specify pre-existing knowledge that can be obtained from heterogeneous sources, to constrain or guide structure learning. Each approach is assessed in terms of structure learning effectiveness and efficiency, including graphical accuracy, model fitting, complexity, and runtime; making this the first paper that provides a comparative evaluation of a wide range of knowledge approaches for BN structure learning. Because the value of knowledge depends on what data are available, we illustrate the results both with limited and big data. While the overall results show that knowledge becomes less important with big data due to higher learning accuracy rendering knowledge less important, some of the knowledge approaches are actually found to be more important with big data. Amongst the main conclusions is the observation that reduced search space obtained from knowledge does not always imply reduced computational complexity, perhaps because the relationships implied by the data and knowledge are in tension.

(0 min) We introduce primed-PCA (pPCA), a two-step algorithm for speeding up the approximation of principal components. This algorithm first runs any approximate-PCA method to get an initial estimate of the principal components (priming), and then applies an exact PCA in the subspace they span. Since this subspace is of small dimension in any practical use, the second step is extremely cheap computationally. Nonetheless, it improves accuracy significantly for a given computational budget across datasets. In this setup, the purpose of the priming is to narrow down the search space, and prepare the data for the second step, an exact calculation. We show formally that pPCA improves upon the priming algorithm under very mild conditions, and we provide experimental validation on both synthetic and real large-scale datasets showing that it systematically translates to improved performance. In our experiments we study pPCA by priming it with the power method, Oja's rule and the recently proposed EigenGame algorithm for extremely large scale datasets.

(2 min) Federated learning is an emerging paradigm that permits a large number of clients with heterogeneous data to coordinate learning of a unified global model without the need to share data amongst each other. Standard federated learning algorithms involve averaging of model parameters or gradient updates to approximate the global model at the server. However, in heterogeneous settings averaging can result in information loss and lead to poor generalization due to the bias induced by dominant clients. We hypothesize that to generalize better across non-i.i.d datasets as in FL settings, the algorithms should focus on learning the invariant mechanism that is constant while ignoring spurious mechanisms that differ across clients. Inspired from recent work in the Out-of-Distribution literature, we propose a gradient masked averaging approach for federated learning as an alternative to the standard averaging of client updates. This client update aggregation technique can be adapted as a drop-in replacement in most existing federated algorithms. We perform extensive experiments with gradient masked approach on multiple FL algorithms with in-distribution, real-world, and out-of-distribution (as the worst case scenario) test dataset and show that it provides consistent improvements, particularly in the case of heterogeneous clients.

(0 min) Recently, deep neural networks have gained increasing popularity in the field of time series forecasting. A primary reason for their success is their ability to effectively capture complex temporal dynamics across multiple related time series. The advantages of these deep forecasters only start to emerge in the presence of a sufficient amount of data. This poses a challenge for typical forecasting problems in practice, where there is a limited number of time series or observations per time series, or both. To cope with this data scarcity issue, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework, Domain Adaptation Forecaster (DAF). DAF leverages statistical strengths from a relevant domain with abundant data samples (source) to improve the performance on the domain of interest with limited data (target). In particular, we use an attention-based shared module with a domain discriminator across domains and private modules for individual domains. We induce domain-invariant latent features (queries and keys) and retrain domain-specific features (values) simultaneously to enable joint training of forecasters on source and target domains. A main insight is that our design of aligning keys allows the target domain to leverage source time series even with different characteristics. Extensive experiments on various domains demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic and real-world datasets, and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our design choices.

(0 min) In this paper, we study the finite-sum convex optimization problem focusing on the general convex case. Recently, the study of variance reduced (VR) methods and their accelerated variants has made exciting progress. However, the step size used in the existing VR algorithms typically depends on the smoothness parameter, which is often unknown and requires tuning in practice. To address this problem, we propose two novel adaptive VR algorithms: Adaptive Variance Reduced Accelerated Extra-Gradient (AdaVRAE) and Adaptive Variance Reduced Accelerated Gradient (AdaVRAG). Our algorithms do not require knowledge of the smoothness parameter. AdaVRAE uses $\mathcal{O}\left(n\log\log n+\sqrt{\frac{n\beta}{\epsilon}}\right)$ gradient evaluations and AdaVRAG uses $\mathcal{O}\left(n\log\log n+\sqrt{\frac{n\beta\log\beta}{\epsilon}}\right)$ gradient evaluations to attain an $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon)$-suboptimal solution, where $n$ is the number of functions in the finite sum and $\beta$ is the smoothness parameter. This result matches the best-known convergence rate of non-adaptive VR methods and it improves upon the convergence of the state of the art adaptive VR method, AdaSVRG. We demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithms compared with previous methods in experiments on real-world datasets.

(0 min) Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) provide a powerful framework to model causal relationships among variables in multivariate settings; in addition, through the do-calculus theory, they allow for the identification and estimation of causal effects between variables also from pure observational data. In this setting, the process of inferring the DAG structure from the data is referred to as causal structure learning or causal discovery. We introduce BCDAG, an R package for Bayesian causal discovery and causal effect estimation from Gaussian observational data, implementing the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme proposed by Castelletti & Mascaro (2021). Our implementation scales efficiently with the number of observations and, whenever the DAGs are sufficiently sparse, with the number of variables in the dataset. The package also provides functions for convergence diagnostics and for visualizing and summarizing posterior inference. In this paper, we present the key features of the underlying methodology along with its implementation in BCDAG. We then illustrate the main functions and algorithms on both real and simulated datasets.

(0 min) Stock market forecasting is a lucrative field of interest with promising profits but not without its difficulties and for some people could be even causes of failure. Financial markets by their nature are complex, non-linear and chaotic, which implies that accurately predicting the prices of assets that are part of it becomes very complicated. In this paper we propose a stock trading system having as main core the feed-forward deep neural networks (DNN) to predict the price for the next 30 days of open market, of the shares issued by Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (ANF) in the stock market of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The system we have elaborated calculates the most effective technical indicator, applying it to the predictions computed by the DNNs, for generating trades. The results showed an increase in values such as Expectancy Ratio of 2.112% of profitable trades with Sharpe, Sortino, and Calmar Ratios of 2.194, 3.340, and 12.403 respectively. As a verification, we adopted a backtracking simulation module in our system, which maps trades to actual test data consisting of the last 30 days of open market on the ANF asset. Overall, the results were promising bringing a total profit factor of 3.2% in just one month from a very modest budget of $100. This was possible because the system reduced the number of trades by choosing the most effective and efficient trades, saving on commissions and slippage costs.

(0 min) In this paper, we generalize the concept of heavy-tailed multi-armed bandits to adversarial environments, and develop robust best-of-both-worlds algorithms for heavy-tailed multi-armed bandits (MAB), where losses have $\alpha$-th ($1<\alpha\le 2$) moments bounded by $\sigma^\alpha$, while the variances may not exist. Specifically, we design an algorithm \texttt{HTINF}, when the heavy-tail parameters $\alpha$ and $\sigma$ are known to the agent, \texttt{HTINF} simultaneously achieves the optimal regret for both stochastic and adversarial environments, without knowing the actual environment type a-priori. When $\alpha,\sigma$ are unknown, \texttt{HTINF} achieves a $\log T$-style instance-dependent regret in stochastic cases and $o(T)$ no-regret guarantee in adversarial cases. We further develop an algorithm \texttt{AdaTINF}, achieving $\mathcal O(\sigma K^{1-\nicefrac 1\alpha}T^{\nicefrac{1}{\alpha}})$ minimax optimal regret even in adversarial settings, without prior knowledge on $\alpha$ and $\sigma$. This result matches the known regret lower-bound (Bubeck et al., 2013), which assumed a stochastic environment and $\alpha$ and $\sigma$ are both known. To our knowledge, the proposed \texttt{HTINF} algorithm is the first to enjoy a best-of-both-worlds regret guarantee, and \texttt{AdaTINF} is the first algorithm that can adapt to both $\alpha$ and $\sigma$ to achieve optimal gap-indepedent regret bound in classical heavy-tailed stochastic MAB setting and our novel adversarial formulation.

(0 min) Over the years, processor throughput has steadily increased. However, the memory throughput has not increased at the same rate, which has led to the memory wall problem in turn increasing the gap between effective and theoretical peak processor performance. To cope with this, there has been an abundance of work in the area of data/instruction prefetcher designs. Broadly, prefetchers predict future data/instruction address accesses and proactively fetch data/instructions in the memory hierarchy with the goal of lowering data/instruction access latency. To this end, one or more prefetchers are deployed at each level of the memory hierarchy, but typically, each prefetcher gets designed in isolation without comprehensively accounting for other prefetchers in the system. As a result, individual prefetchers do not always complement each other, and that leads to lower average performance gains and/or many negative outliers. In this work, we propose Puppeteer, which is a hardware prefetcher manager that uses a suite of random forest regressors to determine at runtime which prefetcher should be ON at each level in the memory hierarchy, such that the prefetchers complement each other and we reduce the data/instruction access latency. Compared to a design with no prefetchers, using Puppeteer we improve IPC by 46.0% in 1 Core (1C), 25.8% in 4 Core (4C), and 11.9% in 8 Core (8C) processors on average across traces generated from SPEC2017, SPEC2006, and Cloud suites with ~10KB overhead. Moreover, we also reduce the number of negative outliers by over 89%, and the performance loss of the worst-case negative outlier from 25% to only 5% compared to the state-of-the-art.

(0 min) Model inversion attacks (MIAs) aim to create synthetic images that reflect the class-wise characteristics from a target classifier's training data by exploiting the model's learned knowledge. Previous research has developed generative MIAs using generative adversarial networks (GANs) as image priors that are tailored to a specific target model. This makes the attacks time- and resource-consuming, inflexible, and susceptible to distributional shifts between datasets. To overcome these drawbacks, we present Plug & Play Attacks that loosen the dependency between the target model and image prior and enable the use of a single trained GAN to attack a broad range of targets with only minor attack adjustments needed. Moreover, we show that powerful MIAs are possible even with publicly available pre-trained GANs and under strong distributional shifts, whereas previous approaches fail to produce meaningful results. Our extensive evaluation confirms the improved robustness and flexibility of Plug & Play Attacks and their ability to create high-quality images revealing sensitive class characteristics.

(0 min) Scientists have developed hundreds of techniques to measure the interactions between pairs of processes in complex systems. But these computational methods -- from correlation coefficients to causal inference -- rely on distinct quantitative theories that remain largely disconnected. Here we introduce a library of 249 statistics for pairwise interactions and assess their behavior on 1053 multivariate time series from a wide range of real-world and model-generated systems. Our analysis highlights new commonalities between different mathematical formulations, providing a unified picture of a rich, interdisciplinary literature. We then show that leveraging many methods from across science can uncover those most suitable for addressing a given problem, yielding high accuracy and interpretable understanding. Our framework is provided in extendable open software, enabling comprehensive data-driven analysis by integrating decades of methodological advances.

(0 min) For many machine learning models, a choice of hyperparameters is a crucial step towards achieving high performance. Prevalent meta-learning approaches focus on obtaining good hyperparameters configurations with a limited computational budget for a completely new task based on the results obtained from the prior tasks. This paper proposes a new formulation of the tuning problem, called consolidated learning, more suited to practical challenges faced by model developers, in which a large number of predictive models are created on similar data sets. In such settings, we are interested in the total optimization time rather than tuning for a single task. We show that a carefully selected static portfolio of hyperparameters yields good results for anytime optimization, maintaining ease of use and implementation. Moreover, we point out how to construct such a portfolio for specific domains. The improvement in the optimization is possible due to more efficient transfer of hyperparameter configurations between similar tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through an empirical study for XGBoost algorithm and the collection of predictive tasks extracted from the MIMIC-IV medical database; however, consolidated learning is applicable in many others fields.

(0 min) Decentralized cooperation in partially-observable multi-agent systems requires effective communications among agents. To support this effort, this work focuses on the class of problems where global communications are available but may be unreliable, thus precluding differentiable communication learning methods. We introduce FCMNet, a reinforcement learning based approach that allows agents to simultaneously learn a) an effective multi-hop communications protocol and b) a common, decentralized policy that enables team-level decision-making. Specifically, our proposed method utilizes the hidden states of multiple directional recurrent neural networks as communication messages among agents. Using a simple multi-hop topology, we endow each agent with the ability to receive information sequentially encoded by every other agent at each time step, leading to improved global cooperation. We demonstrate FCMNet on a challenging set of StarCraft II micromanagement tasks with shared rewards, as well as a collaborative multi-agent pathfinding task with individual rewards. There, our comparison results show that FCMNet outperforms state-of-the-art communication-based reinforcement learning methods in all StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, and value decomposition methods in certain tasks. We further investigate the robustness of FCMNet under realistic communication disturbances, such as random message loss or binarized messages (i.e., non-differentiable communication channels), to showcase FMCNet's potential applicability to robotic tasks under a variety of real-world conditions.

(0 min) Invertible transformation of large graphs into constant dimensional vectors (embeddings) remains a challenge. In this paper we address it with recursive neural networks: The encoder and the decoder. The encoder network transforms embeddings of subgraphs into embeddings of larger subgraphs, and eventually into the embedding of the input graph. The decoder does the opposite. The dimension of the embeddings is constant regardless of the size of the (sub)graphs. Simulation experiments presented in this paper confirm that our proposed graph autoencoder can handle graphs with even thousands of vertices.

(0 min) In this work, we consider the problem of designing secure and efficient federated learning (FL) frameworks. Existing solutions either involve a trusted aggregator or require heavyweight cryptographic primitives, which degrades performance significantly. Moreover, many existing secure FL designs work only under the restrictive assumption that none of the clients can be dropped out from the training protocol. To tackle these problems, we propose SEFL, a secure and efficient FL framework that (1) eliminates the need for the trusted entities; (2) achieves similar and even better model accuracy compared with existing FL designs; (3) is resilient to client dropouts. Through extensive experimental studies on natural language processing (NLP) tasks, we demonstrate that the SEFL achieves comparable accuracy compared to existing FL solutions, and the proposed pruning technique can improve runtime performance up to 13.7x.

(0 min) The interpretation of the electrocardiogram (ECG) gives clinical information and helps in assessing heart function. There are distinct ECG patterns associated with a specific class of arrythmia. The convolutional neural network is currently one of the most commonly employed deep learning algorithms for ECG processing. However, deep learning models require many hyperparameters to tune. Selecting an optimal or best hyperparameter for the convolutional neural network algorithm is a highly challenging task. Often, we end up tuning the model manually with different possible ranges of values until a best fit model is obtained. Automatic hyperparameters tuning using Bayesian optimisation (BO) and evolutionary algorithms can provide an effective solution to current labour-intensive manual configuration approaches. In this paper, we propose to optimise the Residual one Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network model (R-1D-CNN) at two levels. At the first level, a residual convolutional layer and one-dimensional convolutional neural layers are trained to learn patient-specific ECG features over which multilayer perceptron layers can learn to produce the final class vectors of each input. This level is manual and aims to lower the search space. The second level is automatic and based on our proposed BO-based algorithm. Our proposed optimised R-1D-CNN architecture is evaluated on two publicly available ECG Datasets. Comparative experimental results demonstrate that our BO-based algorithm achieves an optimal rate of 99.95%, while the baseline model achieves 99.70% for the MIT-BIH database. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture fine-tuned with BO achieves a higher accuracy than the other proposed architectures. Our optimised architecture achieves excellent results compared to previous works on benchmark datasets.

(0 min) Wasserstein barycenters have become popular due to their ability to represent the average of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. In this paper, we present an algorithm to approximate the Wasserstein-2 barycenters of continuous measures via a generative model. Previous approaches rely on regularization (entropic/quadratic) which introduces bias or on input convex neural networks which are not expressive enough for large-scale tasks. In contrast, our algorithm does not introduce bias and allows using arbitrary neural networks. In addition, based on the celebrity faces dataset, we construct Ave, celeba! dataset which can be used for quantitative evaluation of barycenter algorithms by using standard metrics of generative models such as FID.

(0 min) In classical federated learning, the clients contribute to the overall training by communicating local updates for the underlying model on their private data to a coordinating server. However, updating and communicating the entire model becomes prohibitively expensive when resource-constrained clients collectively aim to train a large machine learning model. Split learning provides a natural solution in such a setting, where only a small part of the model is stored and trained on clients while the remaining large part of the model only stays at the servers. However, the model partitioning employed in split learning introduces a significant amount of communication cost. This paper addresses this issue by compressing the additional communication using a novel clustering scheme accompanied by a gradient correction method. Extensive empirical evaluations on image and text benchmarks show that the proposed method can achieve up to $490\times$ communication cost reduction with minimal drop in accuracy, and enables a desirable performance vs. communication trade-off.

(0 min) We study the overparametrization bounds required for the global convergence of stochastic gradient descent algorithm for a class of one hidden layer feed-forward neural networks, considering most of the activation functions used in practice, including ReLU. We improve the existing state-of-the-art results in terms of the required hidden layer width. We introduce a new proof technique combining nonlinear analysis with properties of random initializations of the network. First, we establish the global convergence of continuous solutions of the differential inclusion being a nonsmooth analogue of the gradient flow for the MSE loss. Second, we provide a technical result (working also for general approximators) relating solutions of the aforementioned differential inclusion to the (discrete) stochastic gradient descent sequences, hence establishing linear convergence towards zero loss for the stochastic gradient descent iterations.

(0 min) Automated decision support systems promise to help human experts solve tasks more efficiently and accurately. However, existing systems typically require experts to understand when to cede agency to the system or when to exercise their own agency. Moreover, if the experts develop a misplaced trust in the system, their performance may worsen. In this work, we lift the above requirement and develop automated decision support systems that, by design, do not require experts to understand when to trust them to provably improve their performance. To this end, we focus on multiclass classification tasks and consider automated decision support systems that, for each data sample, use a classifier to recommend a subset of labels to a human expert. We first show that, by looking at the design of such systems from the perspective of conformal prediction, we can ensure that the probability that the recommended subset of labels contains the true label matches almost exactly a target probability value. Then, we identify the set of target probability values under which the human expert is provably better off predicting a label among those in the recommended subset and develop an efficient practical method to find a near-optimal target probability value. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that our system can help the experts make more accurate predictions and is robust to the accuracy of the classifier it relies on.

(0 min) Understanding the relation between anatomy andgait is key to successful predictive gait simulation. Inthis paper, we present Generative GaitNet, which isa novel network architecture based on deep reinforce-ment learning for controlling a comprehensive, full-body, musculoskeletal model with 304 Hill-type mus-culotendons. The Generative Gait is a pre-trained, in-tegrated system of artificial neural networks learnedin a 618-dimensional continuous domain of anatomyconditions (e.g., mass distribution, body proportion,bone deformity, and muscle deficits) and gait condi-tions (e.g., stride and cadence). The pre-trained Gait-Net takes anatomy and gait conditions as input andgenerates a series of gait cycles appropriate to theconditions through physics-based simulation. We willdemonstrate the efficacy and expressive power of Gen-erative GaitNet to generate a variety of healthy andpathologic human gaits in real-time physics-based sim-ulation.

(0 min) We analyse the privacy leakage of noisy stochastic gradient descent by modeling R\'enyi divergence dynamics with Langevin diffusions. Inspired by recent work on non-stochastic algorithms, we derive similar desirable properties in the stochastic setting. In particular, we prove that the privacy loss converges exponentially fast for smooth and strongly convex objectives under constant step size, which is a significant improvement over previous DP-SGD analyses. We also extend our analysis to arbitrary sequences of varying step sizes and derive new utility bounds. Last, we propose an implementation and our experiments show the practical utility of our approach compared to classical DP-SGD libraries.

(0 min) We address the following foundational question: what is the population, and sample, Frechet mean (or median) graph of an ensemble of inhomogeneous Erdos-Renyi random graphs? We prove that if we use the Hamming distance to compute distances between graphs, then the Frechet mean (or median) graph of an ensemble of inhomogeneous random graphs is obtained by thresholding the expected adjacency matrix of the ensemble. We show that the result also holds for the sample mean (or median) when the population expected adjacency matrix is replaced with the sample mean adjacency matrix. Consequently, the Frechet mean (or median) graph of inhomogeneous Erdos-Renyi random graphs exhibits a sharp threshold: it is either the empty graph, or the complete graph. This novel theoretical result has some significant practical consequences; for instance, the Frechet mean of an ensemble of sparse inhomogeneous random graphs is always the empty graph.

(0 min) Antibodies are versatile proteins that bind to pathogens like viruses and stimulate the adaptive immune system. The specificity of antibody binding is determined by complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) at the tips of these Y-shaped proteins. In this paper, we propose a generative model to automatically design the CDRs of antibodies with enhanced binding specificity or neutralization capabilities. Previous generative approaches formulate protein design as a structure-conditioned sequence generation task, assuming the desired 3D structure is given a priori. In contrast, we propose to co-design the sequence and 3D structure of CDRs as graphs. Our model unravels a sequence autoregressively while iteratively refining its predicted global structure. The inferred structure in turn guides subsequent residue choices. For efficiency, we model the conditional dependence between residues inside and outside of a CDR in a coarse-grained manner. Our method achieves superior log-likelihood on the test set and outperforms previous baselines in designing antibodies capable of neutralizing the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

(0 min) Simplicial complexes form an important class of topological spaces that are frequently used in many application areas such as computer-aided design, computer graphics, and simulation. Representation learning on graphs, which are just 1-d simplicial complexes, has witnessed a great attention in recent years. However, there has not been enough effort to extend representation learning to higher dimensional simplicial objects due to the additional complexity these objects hold, especially when it comes to entire-simplicial complex representation learning. In this work, we propose a method for simplicial complex-level representation learning that embeds a simplicial complex to a universal embedding space in a way that complex-to-complex proximity is preserved. Our method uses our novel geometric message passing schemes to learn an entire simplicial complex representation in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate the proposed model on publicly available mesh dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first method for learning simplicial complex-level representation.

(0 min) Many interesting tasks in image restoration can be cast as linear inverse problems. A recent family of approaches for solving these problems uses stochastic algorithms that sample from the posterior distribution of natural images given the measurements. However, efficient solutions often require problem-specific supervised training to model the posterior, whereas unsupervised methods that are not problem-specific typically rely on inefficient iterative methods. This work addresses these issues by introducing Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models (DDRM), an efficient, unsupervised posterior sampling method. Motivated by variational inference, DDRM takes advantage of a pre-trained denoising diffusion generative model for solving any linear inverse problem. We demonstrate DDRM's versatility on several image datasets for super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, and colorization under various amounts of measurement noise. DDRM outperforms the current leading unsupervised methods on the diverse ImageNet dataset in reconstruction quality, perceptual quality, and runtime, being 5x faster than the nearest competitor. DDRM also generalizes well for natural images out of the distribution of the observed ImageNet training set.

(0 min) Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify theoretical issues in their approach, provide a corrected theory, and derive a new algorithm that is provably safe on finite Markov Decision Processes (MDP). Additionally, we provide a heuristic algorithm that exhibits the best performance among many state of the art SPI algorithms on two different benchmarks. Furthermore, we introduce a taxonomy of SPI algorithms and empirically show an interesting property of two classes of SPI algorithms: while the mean performance of algorithms that incorporate the uncertainty as a penalty on the action-value is higher, actively restricting the set of policies more consistently produces good policies and is, thus, safer.

(0 min) Second-order optimizers are thought to hold the potential to speed up neural network training, but due to the enormous size of the curvature matrix, they typically require approximations to be computationally tractable. The most successful family of approximations are Kronecker-Factored, block-diagonal curvature estimates (KFAC). Here, we combine tools from prior work to evaluate exact second-order updates with careful ablations to establish a surprising result: Due to its approximations, KFAC is not closely related to second-order updates, and in particular, it significantly outperforms true second-order updates. This challenges widely held believes and immediately raises the question why KFAC performs so well. We answer this question by showing that KFAC approximates a first-order algorithm, which performs gradient descent on neurons rather than weights. Finally, we show that this optimizer often improves over KFAC in terms of computational cost and data-efficiency.

(0 min) We consider primal-dual-based reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with non-stationary objectives and constraints, which play a central role in ensuring the safety of RL in time-varying environments. In this problem, the reward/utility functions and the state transition functions are both allowed to vary arbitrarily over time as long as their cumulative variations do not exceed certain known variation budgets. Designing safe RL algorithms in time-varying environments is particularly challenging because of the need to integrate the constraint violation reduction, safe exploration, and adaptation to the non-stationarity. To this end, we propose a Periodically Restarted Optimistic Primal-Dual Proximal Policy Optimization (PROPD-PPO) algorithm that features three mechanisms: periodic-restart-based policy improvement, dual update with dual regularization, and periodic-restart-based optimistic policy evaluation. We establish a dynamic regret bound and a constraint violation bound for the proposed algorithm in both the linear kernel CMDP function approximation setting and the tabular CMDP setting. This paper provides the first provably efficient algorithm for non-stationary CMDPs with safe exploration.

(0 min) Implicit deep learning architectures, like Neural ODEs and Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs), separate the definition of a layer from the description of its solution process. While implicit layers allow features such as depth to adapt to new scenarios and inputs automatically, this adaptivity makes its computational expense challenging to predict. Numerous authors have noted that implicit layer techniques can be more computationally intensive than explicit layer methods. In this manuscript, we address the question: is there a way to simultaneously achieve the robustness of implicit layers while allowing the reduced computational expense of an explicit layer? To solve this we develop Skip DEQ, an implicit-explicit (IMEX) layer that simultaneously trains an explicit prediction followed by an implicit correction. We show that training this explicit layer is free and even decreases the training time by 2.5x and prediction time by 3.4x. We then further increase the "implicitness" of the DEQ by redefining the method in terms of an infinite time neural ODE which paradoxically decreases the training cost over a standard neural ODE by not requiring backpropagation through time. We demonstrate how the resulting Continuous Skip DEQ architecture trains more robustly than the original DEQ while achieving faster training and prediction times. Together, this manuscript shows how bridging the dichotomy of implicit and explicit deep learning can combine the advantages of both techniques.

(0 min) Graphs are a highly expressive data structure, but it is often difficult for humans to find patterns from a complex graph. Hence, generating human-interpretable sequences from graphs have gained interest, called graph2seq learning. It is expected that the compositionality in a graph can be associated to the compositionality in the output sequence in many graph2seq tasks. Therefore, applying compositionality-aware GNN architecture would improve the model performance. In this study, we adopt the multi-level attention pooling (MLAP) architecture, that can aggregate graph representations from multiple levels of information localities. As a real-world example, we take up the extreme source code summarization task, where a model estimate the name of a program function from its source code. We demonstrate that the model having the MLAP architecture outperform the previous state-of-the-art model with more than seven times fewer parameters than it.

(0 min) We develop a novel graph-based trainable framework to maximize the weighted sum energy efficiency (WSEE) for power allocation in wireless communication networks. To address the non-convex nature of the problem, the proposed method consists of modular structures inspired by a classical iterative suboptimal approach and enhanced with learnable components. More precisely, we propose a deep unfolding of the successive concave approximation (SCA) method. In our unfolded SCA (USCA) framework, the originally preset parameters are now learnable via graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) that directly exploit multi-user channel state information as the underlying graph adjacency matrix. We show the permutation equivariance of the proposed architecture, which promotes generalizability across different network topologies of varying size, density, and channel distribution. The USCA framework is trained through a stochastic gradient descent approach using a progressive training strategy. The unsupervised loss is carefully devised to feature the monotonic property of the objective under maximum power constraints. Comprehensive numerical results demonstrate outstanding performance and robustness of USCA over state-of-the-art benchmarks.

(0 min) This paper tackles the problem of missing data imputation for noisy and non-Gaussian data. A classical imputation method, the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian mixture models, has shown interesting properties when compared to other popular approaches such as those based on k-nearest neighbors or on multiple imputations by chained equations. However, Gaussian mixture models are known to be not robust to heterogeneous data, which can lead to poor estimation performance when the data is contaminated by outliers or come from a non-Gaussian distributions. To overcome this issue, a new expectation maximization algorithm is investigated for mixtures of elliptical distributions with the nice property of handling potential missing data. The complete-data likelihood associated with mixtures of elliptical distributions is well adapted to the EM framework thanks to its conditional distribution, which is shown to be a Student distribution. Experimental results on synthetic data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust to outliers and can be used with non-Gaussian data. Furthermore, experiments conducted on real-world datasets show that this algorithm is very competitive when compared to other classical imputation methods.

(0 min) The representation space of neural models for textual data emerges in an unsupervised manner during training. Understanding how human-interpretable concepts, such as gender, are encoded in these representations would improve the ability of users to \emph{control} the content of these representations and analyze the working of the models that rely on them. One prominent approach to the control problem is the identification and removal of linear concept subspaces -- subspaces in the representation space that correspond to a given concept. While those are tractable and interpretable, neural network do not necessarily represent concepts in linear subspaces. We propose a kernalization of the linear concept-removal objective of [Ravfogel et al. 2022], and show that it is effective in guarding against the ability of certain nonlinear adversaries to recover the concept. Interestingly, our findings suggest that the division between linear and nonlinear models is overly simplistic: when considering the concept of binary gender and its neutralization, we do not find a single kernel space that exclusively contains all the concept-related information. It is therefore challenging to protect against \emph{all} nonlinear adversaries at once.

(0 min) We present a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm for a task-guided robot with unknown continuous-time dynamics deployed in a large-scale complex environment. Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is applied to express a rich robotic specification. To overcome the environmental challenge, we propose a novel path planning-guided reward scheme that is dense over the state space, and crucially, robust to infeasibility of computed geometric paths due to the unknown robot dynamics. To facilitate LTL satisfaction, our approach decomposes the LTL mission into sub-tasks that are solved using distributed DRL, where the sub-tasks are trained in parallel, using Deep Policy Gradient algorithms. Our framework is shown to significantly improve performance (effectiveness, efficiency) and exploration of robots tasked with complex missions in large-scale complex environments.

(0 min) Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), a branch of transfer learning where labels for target samples are unavailable, has been widely researched and developed in recent years with the help of adversarially trained models. Although existing UDA algorithms are able to guide neural networks to extract transferable and discriminative features, classifiers are merely trained under the supervision of labeled source data. Given the inevitable discrepancy between source and target domains, the classifiers can hardly be aware of the target classification boundaries. In this paper, Shuffle Augmentation of Features (SAF), a novel UDA framework, is proposed to address the problem by providing the classifier with supervisory signals from target feature representations. SAF learns from the target samples, adaptively distills class-aware target features, and implicitly guides the classifier to find comprehensive class borders. Demonstrated by extensive experiments, the SAF module can be integrated into any existing adversarial UDA models to achieve performance improvements.

(0 min) Differential privacy (DP) is the de facto standard for training machine learning (ML) models, including neural networks, while ensuring the privacy of individual examples in the training set. Despite a rich literature on how to train ML models with differential privacy, it remains extremely challenging to train real-life, large neural networks with both reasonable accuracy and privacy. We set out to investigate how to do this, using ImageNet image classification as a poster example of an ML task that is very challenging to resolve accurately with DP right now. This paper shares initial lessons from our effort, in the hope that it will inspire and inform other researchers to explore DP training at scale. We show approaches which help to make DP training faster, as well as model types and settings of the training process that tend to work better for DP. Combined, the methods we discuss let us train a Resnet-18 with differential privacy to 47.9% accuracy and privacy parameters $\epsilon = 10, \delta = 10^{-6}$, a significant improvement over "naive" DP-SGD training of Imagenet models but a far cry from the $75\%$ accuracy that can be obtained by the same network without privacy. We share our code at https://github.com/google-research/dp-imagenet calling for others to join us in moving the needle further on DP at scale.

(0 min) The implicit bias induced by the training of neural networks has become a topic of rigorous study. In the limit of gradient flow and gradient descent with appropriate step size, it has been shown that when one trains a deep linear network with logistic or exponential loss on linearly separable data, the weights converge to rank-$1$ matrices. In this paper, we extend this theoretical result to the much wider class of nonlinear ReLU-activated feedforward networks containing fully-connected layers and skip connections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a low-rank phenomenon is proven rigorously for these architectures, and it reflects empirical results in the literature. The proof relies on specific local training invariances, sometimes referred to as alignment, which we show to hold for a wide set of ReLU architectures. Our proof relies on a specific decomposition of the network into a multilinear function and another ReLU network whose weights are constant under a certain parameter directional convergence.

(0 min) Not only automation of manufacturing processes but also automation of automation procedures itself become increasingly relevant to automation research. In this context, automated capability assessment, mainly leveraged by deep learning systems driven from 3D CAD data, have been presented. Current assessment systems may be able to assess CAD data with regards to abstract features, e.g. the ability to automatically separate components from bulk goods, or the presence of gripping surfaces. Nevertheless, they suffer from the factor of black box systems, where an assessment can be learned and generated easily, but without any geometrical indicator about the reasons of the system's decision. By utilizing explainable AI (xAI) methods, we attempt to open up the black box. Explainable AI methods have been used in order to assess whether a neural network has successfully learned a given task or to analyze which features of an input might lead to an adversarial attack. These methods aim to derive additional insights into a neural network, by analyzing patterns from a given input and its impact to the network output. Within the NeuroCAD Project, xAI methods are used to identify geometrical features which are associated with a certain abstract feature. Within this work, a sensitivity analysis (SA), the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP), the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) method as well as the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) have been implemented in the NeuroCAD environment, allowing not only to assess CAD models but also to identify features which have been relevant for the network decision. In the medium run, this might enable to identify regions of interest supporting product designers to optimize their models with regards to assembly processes.

(0 min) Multi-view learning is frequently used in data science. The pairwise correlation maximization is a classical approach for exploring the consensus of multiple views. Since the pairwise correlation is inherent for two views, the extensions to more views can be diversified and the intrinsic interconnections among views are generally lost. To address this issue, we propose to maximize higher order correlations. This can be formulated as a low rank approximation problem with the higher order correlation tensor of multi-view data. We use the generating polynomial method to solve the low rank approximation problem. Numerical results on real multi-view data demonstrate that this method consistently outperforms prior existing methods.

(0 min) Detecting anomalies in multivariate time-series data is essential in many real-world applications. Recently, various deep learning-based approaches have shown considerable improvements in time-series anomaly detection. However, existing methods still have several limitations, such as long training time due to their complex model designs or costly tuning procedures to find optimal hyperparameters (e.g., sliding window length) for a given dataset. In our paper, we propose a novel method called Implicit Neural Representation-based Anomaly Detection (INRAD). Specifically, we train a simple multi-layer perceptron that takes time as input and outputs corresponding values at that time. Then we utilize the representation error as an anomaly score for detecting anomalies. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in performance, training speed, and robustness.

(0 min) Non-convex optimization problems have multiple local optimal solutions. Non-convex optimization problems are commonly found in numerous applications. One of the methods recently proposed to efficiently explore multiple local optimal solutions without random re-initialization relies on the concept of deflation. In this paper, different ways to use deflation in non-convex optimization and nonlinear system solving are discussed. A simple, general and novel deflation constraint is proposed to enable the use of deflation together with existing nonlinear programming solvers or nonlinear system solvers. The connection between the proposed deflation constraint and a minimum distance constraint is presented. Additionally, a number of variations of deflation constraints and their limitations are discussed. Finally, a number of applications of the proposed methodology in the fields of approximate Bayesian inference and topology optimization are presented.

(0 min) Incorporating symmetry as an inductive bias into neural network architecture has led to improvements in generalization, data efficiency, and physical consistency in dynamics modeling. Methods such as CNN or equivariant neural networks use weight tying to enforce symmetries such as shift invariance or rotational equivariance. However, despite the fact that physical laws obey many symmetries, real-world dynamical data rarely conforms to strict mathematical symmetry either due to noisy or incomplete data or to symmetry breaking features in the underlying dynamical system. We explore approximately equivariant networks which are biased towards preserving symmetry but are not strictly constrained to do so. By relaxing equivariance constraints, we find that our models can outperform both baselines with no symmetry bias and baselines with overly strict symmetry in both simulated turbulence domains and real-world multi-stream jet flow.

(0 min) Recently, MLP-like vision models have achieved promising performances on mainstream visual recognition tasks. In contrast with vision transformers and CNNs, the success of MLP-like models shows that simple information fusion operations among tokens and channels can yield a good representation power for deep recognition models. However, existing MLP-like models fuse tokens through static fusion operations, lacking adaptability to the contents of the tokens to be mixed. Thus, customary information fusion procedures are not effective enough. To this end, this paper presents an efficient MLP-like network architecture, dubbed DynaMixer, resorting to dynamic information fusion. Critically, we propose a procedure, on which the DynaMixer model relies, to dynamically generate mixing matrices by leveraging the contents of all the tokens to be mixed. To reduce the time complexity and improve the robustness, a dimensionality reduction technique and a multi-segment fusion mechanism are adopted. Our proposed DynaMixer model (97M parameters) achieves 84.3\% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset without extra training data, performing favorably against the state-of-the-art vision MLP models. When the number of parameters is reduced to 26M, it still achieves 82.7\% top-1 accuracy, surpassing the existing MLP-like models with a similar capacity. The implementation of DynaMixer will be made available to the public.

(2 min) An important preliminary step of optical character recognition systems is the detection of text rows. To address this task in the context of historical data with missing labels, we propose a self-paced learning algorithm capable of improving the row detection performance. We conjecture that pages with more ground-truth bounding boxes are less likely to have missing annotations. Based on this hypothesis, we sort the training examples in descending order with respect to the number of ground-truth bounding boxes, and organize them into k batches. Using our self-paced learning method, we train a row detector over k iterations, progressively adding batches with less ground-truth annotations. At each iteration, we combine the ground-truth bounding boxes with pseudo-bounding boxes (bounding boxes predicted by the model itself) using non-maximum suppression, and we include the resulting annotations at the next training iteration. We demonstrate that our self-paced learning strategy brings significant performance gains on two data sets of historical documents, improving the average precision of YOLOv4 with more than 12% on one data set and 39% on the other.

(2 min) We introduce a simple and fast method for comparing graphs of different sizes. Existing approaches are often either limited to comparing graphs with the same number of vertices or are computationally unscalable. We propose the Embedded Laplacian Distance (ELD) for comparing graphs of potentially vastly different sizes. Our approach first projects the graphs onto a common, low-dimensional Laplacian embedding space that respects graphical structure. This reduces the problem to that of comparing point clouds in a Euclidean space. A distance can then be computed efficiently via a natural sliced Wasserstein approach. We show that the ELD is a pseudo-metric and is invariant under graph isomorphism. We provide intuitive interpretations of the ELD using tools from spectral graph theory. We test the efficacy of the ELD approach extensively on both simulated and real data. Results obtained are excellent.

(2 min) Previous numerical results have shown that a two time-scale update rule (TTUR) using constant learning rates is practically useful for training generative adversarial networks (GANs). Meanwhile, a theoretical analysis of TTUR to find a stationary local Nash equilibrium of a Nash equilibrium problem with two players, a discriminator and a generator, has been given using decaying learning rates. In this paper, we give a theoretical analysis of TTUR using constant learning rates to bridge the gap between theory and practice. In particular, we show that, for TTUR using constant learning rates, the number of steps needed to find a stationary local Nash equilibrium decreases as the batch size increases. We also provide numerical results to support our theoretical analyzes.

(2 min) A major archetype of artificial intelligence is developing algorithms facilitating temporal efficiency and accuracy while boosting the generalization performance. Even with the latest developments in machine learning, a key limitation has been the inefficient feature extraction from the initial data, which is essential in performance optimization. Here, we introduce a feature extraction method inspired by sensory cortical networks in the brain. Dubbed as bioinspired cortex, the algorithm provides convergence to orthogonal features from streaming signals with superior computational efficiency while processing data in compressed form. We demonstrate the performance of the new algorithm using artificially created complex data by comparing it with the commonly used traditional clustering algorithms, such as Birch, GMM, and K-means. While the data processing time is significantly reduced, seconds versus hours, encoding distortions remain essentially the same in the new algorithm providing a basis for better generalization. Although we show herein the superior performance of the cortex model in clustering and vector quantization, it also provides potent implementation opportunities for machine learning fundamental components, such as reasoning, anomaly detection and classification in large scope applications, e.g., finance, cybersecurity, and healthcare.

(2 min) Federated Learning (FL) has shown great potential as a privacy-preserving solution to learning from decentralized data that are only accessible to end devices (i.e., clients). In many scenarios, however, a large proportion of the clients are probably in possession of low-quality data that are biased, noisy or even irrelevant. As a result, they could significantly slow down the convergence of the global model we aim to build and also compromise its quality. In light of this, we propose FedProf, a novel algorithm for optimizing FL under such circumstances without breaching data privacy. The key of our approach is a distributional representation profiling and matching scheme that uses the global model to dynamically profile data representations and allows for low-cost, lightweight representation matching. Based on the scheme we adaptively score each client and adjust its participation probability so as to mitigate the impact of low-value clients on the training process. We have conducted extensive experiments on public datasets using various FL settings. The results show that the selective behaviour of our algorithm leads to a significant reduction in the number of communication rounds and the amount of time (up to 2.4x speedup) for the global model to converge and also provides accuracy gain.

(2 min) Finding multiple solutions of non-convex optimization problems is a ubiquitous yet challenging task. Typical existing solutions either apply single-solution optimization methods from multiple random initial guesses or search in the vicinity of found solutions using ad hoc heuristics. We present an end-to-end method to learn the proximal operator across a family of non-convex problems, which can then be used to recover multiple solutions for unseen problems at test time. Our method only requires access to the objectives without needing the supervision of ground truth solutions. Notably, the added proximal regularization term elevates the convexity of our formulation: by applying recent theoretical results, we show that for weakly-convex objectives and under mild regularity conditions, training of the proximal operator converges globally in the over-parameterized setting. We further present a benchmark for multi-solution optimization including a wide range of applications and evaluate our method to demonstrate its effectiveness.

(2 min) Compositional generalization is a troubling blind spot for neural language models. Recent efforts have presented techniques for improving a model's ability to encode novel combinations of known inputs, but less work has focused on generating novel combinations of known outputs. Here we focus on this latter "decode-side" form of generalization in the context of gSCAN, a synthetic benchmark for compositional generalization in grounded language understanding. We present Recursive Decoding (RD), a novel procedure for training and using seq2seq models, targeted towards decode-side generalization. Rather than generating an entire output sequence in one pass, models are trained to predict one token at a time. Inputs (i.e., the external gSCAN environment) are then incrementally updated based on predicted tokens, and re-encoded for the next decoder time step. RD thus decomposes a complex, out-of-distribution sequence generation task into a series of incremental predictions that each resemble what the model has already seen during training. RD yields dramatic improvement on two previously neglected generalization tasks in gSCAN. We provide analyses to elucidate these gains over failure of a baseline, and then discuss implications for generalization in naturalistic grounded language understanding, and seq2seq more generally.

(2 min) A Bayes point machine is a single classifier that approximates the majority decision of an ensemble of classifiers. This paper observes that kernel interpolation is a Bayes point machine for Gaussian process classification. This observation facilitates the transfer of results from both ensemble theory as well as an area of convex geometry known as Brunn-Minkowski theory to derive PAC-Bayes risk bounds for kernel interpolation. Since large margin, infinite width neural networks are kernel interpolators, the paper's findings may help to explain generalisation in neural networks more broadly. Supporting this idea, the paper finds evidence that large margin, finite width neural networks behave like Bayes point machines too.

(2 min) Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is known in practice to be non-robust to distributional shift where the training and the test distributions are different. A suite of approaches, such as importance weighting, and variants of distributionally robust optimization (DRO), have been proposed to solve this problem. But a line of recent work has empirically shown that these approaches do not significantly improve over ERM in real applications with distribution shift. The goal of this work is to obtain a comprehensive theoretical understanding of this intriguing phenomenon. We first posit the class of Generalized Reweighting (GRW) algorithms, as a broad category of approaches that iteratively update model parameters based on iterative reweighting of the training samples. We show that when overparameterized models are trained under GRW, the resulting models are close to that obtained by ERM. We also show that adding small regularization which does not greatly affect the empirical training accuracy does not help. Together, our results show that a broad category of what we term GRW approaches are not able to achieve distributionally robust generalization. Our work thus has the following sobering takeaway: to make progress towards distributionally robust generalization, we either have to develop non-GRW approaches, or perhaps devise novel classification/regression loss functions that are adapted to the class of GRW approaches.

(2 min) How do two distributions of texts differ? Humans are slow at answering this, since discovering patterns might require tediously reading through hundreds of samples. We propose to automatically summarize the differences by "learning a natural language hypothesis": given two distributions $D_{0}$ and $D_{1}$, we search for a description that is more often true for $D_{1}$, e.g., "is military-related." To tackle this problem, we fine-tune GPT-3 to propose descriptions with the prompt: "[samples of $D_{0}$] + [samples of $D_{1}$] + the difference between them is _____". We then re-rank the descriptions by checking how often they hold on a larger set of samples with a learned verifier. On a benchmark of 54 real-world binary classification tasks, while GPT-3 Curie (13B) only generates a description similar to human annotation 7% of the time, the performance reaches 61% with fine-tuning and re-ranking, and our best system using GPT-3 Davinci (175B) reaches 76%. We apply our system to describe distribution shifts, debug dataset shortcuts, summarize unknown tasks, and label text clusters, and present analyses based on automatically generated descriptions.

(2 min) In model-based reinforcement learning for safety-critical control systems, it is important to formally certify system properties (e.g., safety, stability) under the learned controller. However, as existing methods typically apply formal verification \emph{after} the controller has been learned, it is sometimes difficult to obtain any certificate, even after many iterations between learning and verification. To address this challenge, we propose a framework that jointly conducts reinforcement learning and formal verification by formulating and solving a novel bilevel optimization problem, which is differentiable by the gradients from the value function and certificates. Experiments on a variety of examples demonstrate the significant advantages of our framework over the model-based stochastic value gradient (SVG) method and the model-free proximal policy optimization (PPO) method in finding feasible controllers with barrier functions and Lyapunov functions that ensure system safety and stability.

(2 min) Few-shot learning aims to learn representations that can tackle novel tasks given a small number of examples. Recent studies show that task distribution plays a vital role in the model's performance. Conventional wisdom is that task diversity should improve the performance of meta-learning. In this work, we find evidence to the contrary; we study different task distributions on a myriad of models and datasets to evaluate the effect of task diversity on meta-learning algorithms. For this experiment, we train on multiple datasets, and with three broad classes of meta-learning models - Metric-based (i.e., Protonet, Matching Networks), Optimization-based (i.e., MAML, Reptile, and MetaOptNet), and Bayesian meta-learning models (i.e., CNAPs). Our experiments demonstrate that the effect of task diversity on all these algorithms follows a similar trend, and task diversity does not seem to offer any benefits to the learning of the model. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that even a handful of tasks, repeated over multiple batches, would be sufficient to achieve a performance similar to uniform sampling and draws into question the need for additional tasks to create better models.

(2 min) Generalization of deep neural networks remains one of the main open problems in machine learning. Previous theoretical works focused on deriving tight bounds of model complexity, while empirical works revealed that neural networks exhibit double descent with respect to both training sample counts and the neural network size. In this paper, we empirically examined how different layers of neural networks contribute differently to the model; we found that early layers generally learn representations relevant to performance on both training data and testing data. Contrarily, deeper layers only minimize training risks and fail to generalize well with testing or mislabeled data. We further illustrate the distance of trained weights to its initial value of final layers has high correlation to generalization errors and can serve as an indicator of an overfit of model. Moreover, we show evidence to support post-training regularization by re-initializing weights of final layers. Our findings provide an efficient method to estimate the generalization capability of neural networks, and the insight of those quantitative results may inspire derivation to better generalization bounds that take the internal structure of neural networks into consideration.

(2 min) We develop an algorithm which can learn from partially labeled and unsegmented sequential data. Most sequential loss functions, such as Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), break down when many labels are missing. We address this problem with Star Temporal Classification (STC) which uses a special star token to allow alignments which include all possible tokens whenever a token could be missing. We express STC as the composition of weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) and use GTN (a framework for automatic differentiation with WFSTs) to compute gradients. We perform extensive experiments on automatic speech recognition. These experiments show that STC can recover most of the performance of supervised baseline when up to 70% of the labels are missing. We also perform experiments in handwriting recognition to show that our method easily applies to other sequence classification tasks.

(2 min) Network coding allows distributed information sources such as sensors to efficiently compress and transmit data to distributed receivers across a bandwidth-limited network. Classical network coding is largely task-agnostic -- the coding schemes mainly aim to faithfully reconstruct data at the receivers, regardless of what ultimate task the received data is used for. In this paper, we analyze a new task-driven network coding problem, where distributed receivers pass transmitted data through machine learning (ML) tasks, which provides an opportunity to improve efficiency by transmitting salient task-relevant data representations. Specifically, we formulate a task-aware network coding problem over a butterfly network in real-coordinate space, where lossy analog compression through principal component analysis (PCA) can be applied. A lower bound for the total loss function for the formulated problem is given, and necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving this lower bound are also provided. We introduce ML algorithms to solve the problem in the general case, and our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of task-aware network coding.

(2 min) Hierarchical forecasting problems arise when time series have a natural group structure, and predictions at multiple levels of aggregation and disaggregation across the groups are needed. In such problems, it is often desired to satisfy the aggregation constraints in a given hierarchy, referred to as hierarchical coherence in the literature. Maintaining hierarchical coherence while producing accurate forecasts can be a challenging problem, especially in the case of probabilistic forecasting. We present a novel method capable of accurate and coherent probabilistic forecasts for hierarchical time series. We call it Deep Poisson Mixture Network (DPMN). It relies on the combination of neural networks and a statistical model for the joint distribution of the hierarchical multivariate time series structure. By construction, the model guarantees hierarchical coherence and provides simple rules for aggregation and disaggregation of the predictive distributions. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation comparing the DPMN to other state-of-the-art methods which produce hierarchically coherent probabilistic forecasts on multiple public datasets. Compared to existing coherent probabilistic models, we obtained a relative improvement in the overall Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS) of 17.1% on Australian domestic tourism data, 24.2 on the Favorita grocery sales dataset, and 6.9% on a San Francisco Bay Area highway traffic dataset.

(2 min) Social media plays an increasing role in our communication with friends and family, and our consumption of information and entertainment. Hence, to design effective ranking functions for posts on social media, it would be useful to predict the affective response to a post (e.g., whether the user is likely to be humored, inspired, angered, informed). Similar to work on emotion recognition (which focuses on the affect of the publisher of the post), the traditional approach to recognizing affective response would involve an expensive investment in human annotation of training data. We introduce CARE$_{db}$, a dataset of 230k social media posts annotated according to 7 affective responses using the Common Affective Response Expression (CARE) method. The CARE method is a means of leveraging the signal that is present in comments that are posted in response to a post, providing high-precision evidence about the affective response of the readers to the post without human annotation. Unlike human annotation, the annotation process we describe here can be iterated upon to expand the coverage of the method, particularly for new affective responses. We present experiments that demonstrate that the CARE annotations compare favorably with crowd-sourced annotations. Finally, we use CARE$_{db}$ to train competitive BERT-based models for predicting affective response as well as emotion detection, demonstrating the utility of the dataset for related tasks.

(2 min) We study the map learned by a family of autoencoders trained on MNIST, and evaluated on ten different data sets created by the random selection of pixel values according to ten different distributions. Specifically, we study the eigenvalues of the Jacobians defined by the weight matrices of the autoencoder at each training and evaluation point. For high enough latent dimension, we find that each autoencoder reconstructs all the evaluation data sets as similar \emph{generalized characters}, but that this reconstructed \emph{generalized character} changes across autoencoder. Eigenvalue analysis shows that even when the reconstructed image appears to be an MNIST character for all out of distribution data sets, not all have latent representations that are close to the latent representation of MNIST characters. All told, the eigenvalue analysis demonstrated a great deal of geometric instability of the autoencoder both as a function on out of distribution inputs, and across architectures on the same set of inputs.

(2 min) Many causal inference approaches have focused on identifying an individual's outcome change due to a potential treatment, or the individual treatment effect (ITE), from observational studies. Rather than only estimating the ITE, we propose Collaborating Causal Networks (CCN) to estimate the full potential outcome distributions. This modification facilitates estimating the utility of each treatment and allows for individual variation in utility functions (e.g., variability in risk tolerance). We show that CCN learns distributions that asymptotically capture the correct potential outcome distributions under standard causal inference assumptions. Furthermore, we develop a new adjustment approach that is empirically effective in alleviating sample imbalance between treatment groups in observational studies. We evaluate CCN by extensive empirical experiments and demonstrate improved distribution estimates compared to existing Bayesian and Generative Adversarial Network-based methods. Additionally, CCN empirically improves decisions over a variety of utility functions.

(2 min) Fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models has been challenging because of a lack of large scale off-the-shelf datasets as well as high variance in transferability among different environments. Recent work has looked at tackling offline RL from the perspective of sequence modeling with improved results as result of the introduction of the Transformer architecture. However, when the model is trained from scratch, it suffers from slow convergence speeds. In this paper, we look to take advantage of this formulation of reinforcement learning as sequence modeling and investigate the transferability of pre-trained sequence models on other domains (vision, language) when finetuned on offline RL tasks (control, games). To this end, we also propose techniques to improve transfer between these domains. Results show consistent performance gains in terms of both convergence speed and reward on a variety of environments, accelerating training by 3-6x and achieving state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks using Wikipedia-pretrained and GPT2 language models. We hope that this work not only brings light to the potentials of leveraging generic sequence modeling techniques and pre-trained models for RL, but also inspires future work on sharing knowledge between generative modeling tasks of completely different domains.

(2 min) We present a percolation inverse problem for diode networks: Given information about which pairs of nodes allow current to percolate from one to the other, can one construct a diode network consistent with the observed currents? We implement a divide-and-concur iterative projection method for solving the problem and demonstrate the supremacy of our method over an exhaustive approach for nontrivial instances of the problem. We find that the problem is most difficult when some but not all of the percolation data are hidden, and that the most difficult networks to reconstruct generally are those for which the currents are most sensitive to the addition or removal of a single diode.

(2 min) Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a popular likelihood-free inference method for models with intractable likelihood functions. As ABC methods usually rely on comparing summary statistics of observed and simulated data, the choice of the statistics is crucial. This choice involves a trade-off between loss of information and dimensionality reduction, and is often determined based on domain knowledge. However, handcrafting and selecting suitable statistics is a laborious task involving multiple trial-and-error steps. In this work, we introduce an active learning method for ABC statistics selection which reduces the domain expert's work considerably. By involving the experts, we are able to handle misspecified models, unlike the existing dimension reduction methods. Moreover, empirical results show better posterior estimates than with existing methods, when the simulation budget is limited.

(2 min) In the area of physical simulations, nearly all neural-network-based methods directly predict future states from the input states. However, many traditional simulation engines instead model the constraints of the system and select the state which satisfies them. Here we present a framework for constraint-based learned simulation, where a scalar constraint function is implemented as a graph neural network, and future predictions are computed by solving the optimization problem defined by the learned constraint. Our model achieves comparable or better accuracy to top learned simulators on a variety of challenging physical domains, and offers several unique advantages. We can improve the simulation accuracy on a larger system by applying more solver iterations at test time. We also can incorporate novel hand-designed constraints at test time and simulate new dynamics which were not present in the training data. Our constraint-based framework shows how key techniques from traditional simulation and numerical methods can be leveraged as inductive biases in machine learning simulators.

(2 min) For deep reinforcement learning (RL) from pixels, learning effective state representations is crucial for achieving high performance. However, in practice, limited experience and high-dimensional input prevent effective representation learning. To address this, motivated by the success of masked modeling in other research fields, we introduce mask-based reconstruction to promote state representation learning in RL. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective self-supervised method, Mask-based Latent Reconstruction (MLR), to predict the complete state representations in the latent space from the observations with spatially and temporally masked pixels. MLR enables the better use of context information when learning state representations to make them more informative, which facilitates RL agent training. Extensive experiments show that our MLR significantly improves the sample efficiency in RL and outperforms the state-of-the-art sample-efficient RL methods on multiple continuous benchmark environments.

(2 min) We provide a stochastic strategy for adapting well-known acquisition functions to allow batch active learning. In deep active learning, labels are often acquired in batches for efficiency. However, many acquisition functions are designed for single-sample acquisition and fail when naively used to construct batches. In contrast, state-of-the-art batch acquisition functions are costly to compute. We show how to extend single-sample acquisition functions to the batch setting. Instead of acquiring the top-K points from the pool set, we account for the fact that acquisition scores are expected to change as new points are acquired. This motivates simple stochastic acquisition strategies using score-based or rank-based distributions. Our strategies outperform the standard top-K acquisition with virtually no computational overhead and can be used as a drop-in replacement. In fact, they are even competitive with much more expensive methods despite their linear computational complexity. We conclude that there is no reason to use top-K batch acquisition in practice.

(2 min) Performance of model-based feedforward controllers is typically limited by the accuracy of the inverse system dynamics model. Physics-guided neural networks (PGNN), where a known physical model cooperates in parallel with a neural network, were recently proposed as a method to achieve high accuracy of the identified inverse dynamics. However, the flexible nature of neural networks can create overparameterization when employed in parallel with a physical model, which results in a parameter drift during training. This drift may result in parameters of the physical model not corresponding to their physical values, which increases vulnerability of the PGNN to operating conditions not present in the training data. To address this problem, this paper proposes a regularization method via identified physical parameters, in combination with an optimized training initialization that improves training convergence. The regularized PGNN framework is validated on a real-life industrial linear motor, where it delivers better tracking accuracy and extrapolation.

(2 min) The hybrid-model (Avent et al 2017) in Differential Privacy is a an augmentation of the local-model where in addition to N local-agents we are assisted by one special agent who is in fact a curator holding the sensitive details of n additional individuals. Here we study the problem of machine learning in the hybrid-model where the n individuals in the curators dataset are drawn from a different distribution than the one of the general population (the local-agents). We give a general scheme -- Subsample-Test-Reweigh -- for this transfer learning problem, which reduces any curator-model DP-learner to a hybrid-model learner in this setting using iterative subsampling and reweighing of the n examples held by the curator based on a smooth variation of the Multiplicative-Weights algorithm (introduced by Bun et al, 2020). Our scheme has a sample complexity which relies on the chi-squared divergence between the two distributions. We give worst-case analysis bounds on the sample complexity required for our private reduction. Aiming to reduce said sample complexity, we give two specific instances our sample complexity can be drastically reduced (one instance is analyzed mathematically, while the other - empirically) and pose several directions for follow-up work.

(2 min) This paper considers the problem of measure estimation under the barycentric coding model (BCM), in which an unknown measure is assumed to belong to the set of Wasserstein-2 barycenters of a finite set of known measures. Estimating a measure under this model is equivalent to estimating the unknown barycenteric coordinates. We provide novel geometrical, statistical, and computational insights for measure estimation under the BCM, consisting of three main results. Our first main result leverages the Riemannian geometry of Wasserstein-2 space to provide a procedure for recovering the barycentric coordinates as the solution to a quadratic optimization problem assuming access to the true reference measures. The essential geometric insight is that the parameters of this quadratic problem are determined by inner products between the optimal displacement maps from the given measure to the reference measures defining the BCM. Our second main result then establishes an algorithm for solving for the coordinates in the BCM when all the measures are observed empirically via i.i.d. samples. We prove precise rates of convergence for this algorithm -- determined by the smoothness of the underlying measures and their dimensionality -- thereby guaranteeing its statistical consistency. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the BCM and associated estimation procedures in three application areas: (i) covariance estimation for Gaussian measures; (ii) image processing; and (iii) natural language processing.

(2 min) We present a novel offline-online method to mitigate the computational burden of Bayesian inference, particularly in the regime where the posterior densities are computationally demanding to evaluate while real-time inference results are needed. In the offline phase, the proposed method learns the joint law of the parameter random variables and the observable random variables in the tensor-train (TT) format. Then, in the online phase, the resulting order-preserving transport can be conditioned on newly observed data to characterize the posterior random variables in real-time. Compared with the state-of-the-art normalizing flows techniques, our proposed method relies on function approximation, for which we can provide a thorough performance analysis. The function approximation perspective allows us to significantly improve the capability of transport maps in challenging problems with high-dimensional observations and high-dimensional parameters. Capitalizing on this, we present novel heuristics to either reorder or reparametrize the variables to enhance the approximation power of TT. We then integrate the TT-based transport maps and the parameter reordering/reparametrization into a layered composite map to further improve the performance of the resulting inference. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on various statistical learning tasks involving ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and partial differential equations (PDEs).

(2 min) Frequency domain processing, and in particular the use of Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT), is the most widespread approach to audio coding. However, at low bitrates, audio quality, especially for speech, degrades drastically due to the lack of available bits to directly code the transform coefficients. Traditionally, post-filtering has been used to mitigate artefacts in the coded speech by exploiting a-priori information of the source and extra transmitted parameters. Recently, data-driven post-filters have shown better results, but at the cost of significant additional complexity and delay. In this work, we propose a mask-based post-filter operating directly in MDCT domain of the codec, inducing no extra delay. The real-valued mask is applied to the quantized MDCT coefficients and is estimated from a relatively lightweight convolutional encoder-decoder network. Our solution is tested on the recently standardized low-delay, low-complexity codec (LC3) at lowest possible bitrate of 16 kbps. Objective and subjective assessments clearly show the advantage of this approach over the conventional post-filter, with an average improvement of 10 MUSHRA points over the LC3 coded speech.

(0 min) Simulation of the dynamics of physical systems is essential to the development of both science and engineering. Recently there is an increasing interest in learning to simulate the dynamics of physical systems using neural networks. However, existing approaches fail to generalize to physical substances not in the training set, such as liquids with different viscosities or elastomers with different elasticities. Here we present a machine learning method embedded with physical priors and material parameters, which we term as "Graph-based Physics Engine" (GPE), to efficiently model the physical dynamics of different substances in a wide variety of scenarios. We demonstrate that GPE can generalize to materials with different properties not seen in the training set and perform well from single-step predictions to multi-step roll-out simulations. In addition, introducing the law of momentum conservation in the model significantly improves the efficiency and stability of learning, allowing convergence to better models with fewer training steps.

(0 min) Reliable uncertainty from deterministic single-forward pass models is sought after because conventional methods of uncertainty quantification are computationally expensive. We take two complex single-forward-pass uncertainty approaches, DUQ and SNGP, and examine whether they mainly rely on a well-regularized feature space. Crucially, without using their more complex methods for estimating uncertainty, a single softmax neural net with such a feature-space, achieved via residual connections and spectral normalization, *outperforms* DUQ and SNGP's epistemic uncertainty predictions using simple Gaussian Discriminant Analysis *post-training* as a separate feature-space density estimator -- without fine-tuning on OoD data, feature ensembling, or input pre-procressing. This conceptually simple *Deep Deterministic Uncertainty (DDU)* baseline can also be used to disentangle aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty and performs as well as Deep Ensembles, the state-of-the art for uncertainty prediction, on several OoD benchmarks (CIFAR-10/100 vs SVHN/Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet vs ImageNet-O) as well as in active learning settings across different model architectures, yet is *computationally cheaper*.

(0 min) Automated decision support systems promise to help human experts solve tasks more efficiently and accurately. However, existing systems typically require experts to understand when to cede agency to the system or when to exercise their own agency. Moreover, if the experts develop a misplaced trust in the system, their performance may worsen. In this work, we lift the above requirement and develop automated decision support systems that, by design, do not require experts to understand when to trust them to provably improve their performance. To this end, we focus on multiclass classification tasks and consider automated decision support systems that, for each data sample, use a classifier to recommend a subset of labels to a human expert. We first show that, by looking at the design of such systems from the perspective of conformal prediction, we can ensure that the probability that the recommended subset of labels contains the true label matches almost exactly a target probability value. Then, we identify the set of target probability values under which the human expert is provably better off predicting a label among those in the recommended subset and develop an efficient practical method to find a near-optimal target probability value. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that our system can help the experts make more accurate predictions and is robust to the accuracy of the classifier it relies on.

(0 min) Predictor screening rules, which discard predictors from the design matrix before fitting a model, have had considerable impact on the speed with which l1-regularized regression problems, such as the lasso, can be solved. Current state-of-the-art screening rules, however, have difficulties in dealing with highly-correlated predictors, often becoming too conservative. In this paper, we present a new screening rule to deal with this issue: the Hessian Screening Rule. The rule uses second-order information from the model to provide more accurate screening as well as higher-quality warm starts. The proposed rule outperforms all studied alternatives on data sets with high correlation for both l1-regularized least-squares (the lasso) and logistic regression. It also performs best overall on the real data sets that we examine.

(0 min) Machine learning models can leak information about the data used to train them. To mitigate this issue, Differentially Private (DP) variants of optimization algorithms like Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) have been designed to trade-off utility for privacy in Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) problems. In this paper, we propose Differentially Private proximal Coordinate Descent (DP-CD), a new method to solve composite DP-ERM problems. We derive utility guarantees through a novel theoretical analysis of inexact coordinate descent. Our results show that, thanks to larger step sizes, DP-CD can exploit imbalance in gradient coordinates to outperform DP-SGD. We also prove new lower bounds for composite DP-ERM under coordinate-wise regularity assumptions, that are nearly matched by DP-CD. For practical implementations, we propose to clip gradients using coordinate-wise thresholds that emerge from our theory, avoiding costly hyperparameter tuning. Experiments on real and synthetic data support our results, and show that DP-CD compares favorably with DP-SGD.

(0 min) We propose a hybrid method for generating arbitrage-free implied volatility (IV) surfaces consistent with historical data by combining model-free Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with continuous time stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven models. We focus on two classes of SDE models: regime switching models and L\'evy additive processes. By projecting historical surfaces onto the space of SDE model parameters, we obtain a distribution on the parameter subspace faithful to the data on which we then train a VAE. Arbitrage-free IV surfaces are then generated by sampling from the posterior distribution on the latent space, decoding to obtain SDE model parameters, and finally mapping those parameters to IV surfaces. We further refine the VAE model by including conditional features and demonstrate its superior generative out-of-sample performance.

(0 min) Minimizing functionals in the space of probability distributions can be done with Wasserstein gradient flows. To solve them numerically, a possible approach is to rely on the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme which is analogous to the proximal scheme in Euclidean spaces. However, it requires solving a nested optimization problem at each iteration, and is known for its computational challenges, especially in high dimension. To alleviate it, very recent works propose to approximate the JKO scheme leveraging Brenier's theorem, and using gradients of Input Convex Neural Networks to parameterize the density (JKO-ICNN). However, this method comes with a high computational cost and stability issues. Instead, this work proposes to use gradient flows in the space of probability measures endowed with the sliced-Wasserstein (SW) distance. We argue that this method is more flexible than JKO-ICNN, since SW enjoys a closed-form differentiable approximation. Thus, the density at each step can be parameterized by any generative model which alleviates the computational burden and makes it tractable in higher dimensions.

(0 min) We study the problem of efficiently scaling ensemble-based deep neural networks for multi-step time series (TS) forecasting on a large set of time series. Current state-of-the-art deep ensemble models have high memory and computational requirements, hampering their use to forecast millions of TS in practical scenarios. We propose N-BEATS(P), a global parallel variant of the N-BEATS model designed to allow simultaneous training of multiple univariate TS forecasting models. Our model addresses the practical limitations of related models, reducing the training time by half and memory requirement by a factor of 5, while keeping the same level of accuracy in all TS forecasting settings. We have performed multiple experiments detailing the various ways to train our model and have obtained results that demonstrate its capacity to generalize in various forecasting conditions and setups.

(2 min) We provide a stochastic strategy for adapting well-known acquisition functions to allow batch active learning. In deep active learning, labels are often acquired in batches for efficiency. However, many acquisition functions are designed for single-sample acquisition and fail when naively used to construct batches. In contrast, state-of-the-art batch acquisition functions are costly to compute. We show how to extend single-sample acquisition functions to the batch setting. Instead of acquiring the top-K points from the pool set, we account for the fact that acquisition scores are expected to change as new points are acquired. This motivates simple stochastic acquisition strategies using score-based or rank-based distributions. Our strategies outperform the standard top-K acquisition with virtually no computational overhead and can be used as a drop-in replacement. In fact, they are even competitive with much more expensive methods despite their linear computational complexity. We conclude that there is no reason to use top-K batch acquisition in practice.

(2 min) This work shows that value-aware model learning, known for its numerous theoretical benefits, is also practically viable for solving challenging continuous control tasks in prevalent model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. First, we derive a novel value-aware model learning objective by bounding the model-advantage i.e. model performance difference, between two MDPs or models given a fixed policy, achieving superior performance to prior value-aware objectives in most continuous control environments. Second, we identify the issue of stale value estimates in naively substituting value-aware objectives in place of maximum-likelihood in dyna-style model-based RL algorithms. Our proposed remedy to this issue bridges the long-standing gap in theory and practice of value-aware model learning by enabling successful deployment of all value-aware objectives in solving several continuous control robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks. Our results are obtained with minimal modifications to two popular and open-source model-based RL algorithms -- SLBO and MBPO, without tuning any existing hyper-parameters, while also demonstrating better performance of value-aware objectives than these baseline in some environments.

(2 min) Parameter sharing, where each agent independently learns a policy with fully shared parameters between all policies, is a popular baseline method for multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, since all agents share the same policy network, they cannot learn different policies or tasks. This issue has been circumvented experimentally by adding an agent-specific indicator signal to observations, which we term "agent indication." Agent indication is limited, however, in that without modification it does not allow parameter sharing to be applied to environments where the action spaces and/or observation spaces are heterogeneous. This work formalizes the notion of agent indication and proves that it enables convergence to optimal policies for the first time. Next, we formally introduce methods to extend parameter sharing to learning in heterogeneous observation and action spaces, and prove that these methods allow for convergence to optimal policies. Finally, we experimentally confirm that the methods we introduce function empirically, and conduct a wide array of experiments studying the empirical efficacy of many different agent indication schemes for graphical observation spaces.

(2 min) We introduce a simple and fast method for comparing graphs of different sizes. Existing approaches are often either limited to comparing graphs with the same number of vertices or are computationally unscalable. We propose the Embedded Laplacian Distance (ELD) for comparing graphs of potentially vastly different sizes. Our approach first projects the graphs onto a common, low-dimensional Laplacian embedding space that respects graphical structure. This reduces the problem to that of comparing point clouds in a Euclidean space. A distance can then be computed efficiently via a natural sliced Wasserstein approach. We show that the ELD is a pseudo-metric and is invariant under graph isomorphism. We provide intuitive interpretations of the ELD using tools from spectral graph theory. We test the efficacy of the ELD approach extensively on both simulated and real data. Results obtained are excellent.

(2 min) Tractably modelling distributions over manifolds has long been an important goal in the natural sciences. Recent work has focused on developing general machine learning models to learn such distributions. However, for many applications these distributions must respect manifold symmetries -- a trait which most previous models disregard. In this paper, we lay the theoretical foundations for learning symmetry-invariant distributions on arbitrary manifolds via equivariant manifold flows. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by using it to learn gauge invariant densities over $SU(n)$ in the context of quantum field theory.

(2 min) It has been recognized that heavily overparameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit surprisingly good generalization performance in various machine-learning tasks. Although benefits of depth have been investigated from different perspectives such as the approximation theory and the statistical learning theory, existing theories do not adequately explain the empirical success of overparameterized DNNs. In this work, we report a remarkable interplay between depth and locality of a target function. We introduce $k$-local and $k$-global functions, and find that depth is beneficial for learning local functions but detrimental to learning global functions. This interplay is not properly captured by the neural tangent kernel, which describes an infinitely wide neural network within the lazy learning regime.

(2 min) We present a novel offline-online method to mitigate the computational burden of Bayesian inference, particularly in the regime where the posterior densities are computationally demanding to evaluate while real-time inference results are needed. In the offline phase, the proposed method learns the joint law of the parameter random variables and the observable random variables in the tensor-train (TT) format. Then, in the online phase, the resulting order-preserving transport can be conditioned on newly observed data to characterize the posterior random variables in real-time. Compared with the state-of-the-art normalizing flows techniques, our proposed method relies on function approximation, for which we can provide a thorough performance analysis. The function approximation perspective allows us to significantly improve the capability of transport maps in challenging problems with high-dimensional observations and high-dimensional parameters. Capitalizing on this, we present novel heuristics to either reorder or reparametrize the variables to enhance the approximation power of TT. We then integrate the TT-based transport maps and the parameter reordering/reparametrization into a layered composite map to further improve the performance of the resulting inference. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on various statistical learning tasks involving ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and partial differential equations (PDEs).

(2 min) Modern machine learning has achieved impressive prediction performance, but often sacrifices interpretability, a critical consideration in many problems. Here, we propose Fast Interpretable Greedy-Tree Sums (FIGS), an algorithm for fitting concise rule-based models. Specifically, FIGS generalizes the CART algorithm to simultaneously grow a flexible number of trees in a summation. The total number of splits across all the trees can be restricted by a pre-specified threshold, thereby keeping both the size and number of its trees under control. When both are small, the fitted tree-sum can be easily visualized and written out by hand, making it highly interpretable. A partially oracle theoretical result hints at the potential for FIGS to overcome a key weakness of single-tree models by disentangling additive components of generative additive models, thereby reducing redundancy from repeated splits on the same feature. Furthermore, given oracle access to optimal tree structures, we obtain L2 generalization bounds for such generative models in the case of C1 component functions, matching known minimax rates in some cases. Extensive experiments across a wide array of real-world datasets show that FIGS achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance (among all popular rule-based methods) when restricted to just a few splits (e.g. less than 20). We find empirically that FIGS is able to avoid repeated splits, and often provides more concise decision rules than fitted decision trees, without sacrificing predictive performance. All code and models are released in a full-fledged package on Github \url{https://github.com/csinva/imodels}.

(2 min) Most data is automatically collected and only ever "seen" by algorithms. Yet, data compressors preserve perceptual fidelity rather than just the information needed by algorithms performing downstream tasks. In this paper, we characterize the bit-rate required to ensure high performance on all predictive tasks that are invariant under a set of transformations, such as data augmentations. Based on our theory, we design unsupervised objectives for training neural compressors. Using these objectives, we train a generic image compressor that achieves substantial rate savings (more than $1000\times$ on ImageNet) compared to JPEG on 8 datasets, without decreasing downstream classification performance.

(2 min) Simplicial complexes form an important class of topological spaces that are frequently used in many application areas such as computer-aided design, computer graphics, and simulation. Representation learning on graphs, which are just 1-d simplicial complexes, has witnessed a great attention in recent years. However, there has not been enough effort to extend representation learning to higher dimensional simplicial objects due to the additional complexity these objects hold, especially when it comes to entire-simplicial complex representation learning. In this work, we propose a method for simplicial complex-level representation learning that embeds a simplicial complex to a universal embedding space in a way that complex-to-complex proximity is preserved. Our method uses our novel geometric message passing schemes to learn an entire simplicial complex representation in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate the proposed model on publicly available mesh dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first method for learning simplicial complex-level representation.

(2 min) Decentralization is a promising method of scaling up parallel machine learning systems. In this paper, we provide a tight lower bound on the iteration complexity for such methods in a stochastic non-convex setting. Our lower bound reveals a theoretical gap in known convergence rates of many existing decentralized training algorithms, such as D-PSGD. We prove by construction this lower bound is tight and achievable. Motivated by our insights, we further propose DeTAG, a practical gossip-style decentralized algorithm that achieves the lower bound with only a logarithm gap. Empirically, we compare DeTAG with other decentralized algorithms on image classification tasks, and we show DeTAG enjoys faster convergence compared to baselines, especially on unshuffled data and in sparse networks.

(2 min) We introduce primed-PCA (pPCA), a two-step algorithm for speeding up the approximation of principal components. This algorithm first runs any approximate-PCA method to get an initial estimate of the principal components (priming), and then applies an exact PCA in the subspace they span. Since this subspace is of small dimension in any practical use, the second step is extremely cheap computationally. Nonetheless, it improves accuracy significantly for a given computational budget across datasets. In this setup, the purpose of the priming is to narrow down the search space, and prepare the data for the second step, an exact calculation. We show formally that pPCA improves upon the priming algorithm under very mild conditions, and we provide experimental validation on both synthetic and real large-scale datasets showing that it systematically translates to improved performance. In our experiments we study pPCA by priming it with the power method, Oja's rule and the recently proposed EigenGame algorithm for extremely large scale datasets.

(2 min) Evaluating explanation techniques using human subjects is costly, time-consuming and can lead to subjectivity in the assessments. To evaluate the accuracy of local explanations, we require access to the true feature importance scores for a given instance. However, the prediction function of a model usually does not decompose into linear additive terms that indicate how much a feature contributes to the output. In this work, we suggest to instead focus on the log odds ratio (LOR) of the prediction function, which naturally decomposes into additive terms for logistic regression and naive Bayes. We demonstrate how we can benchmark different explanation techniques in terms of their similarity to the LOR scores based on our proposed approach. In the experiments, we compare prominent local explanation techniques and find that the performance of the techniques can depend on the underlying model, the dataset, which data point is explained, the normalization of the data and the similarity metric.

(2 min) In many real-world settings, only incomplete measurement data are available which can pose a problem for learning. Unsupervised learning of the signal model using a fixed incomplete measurement process is impossible in general, as there is no information in the nullspace of the measurement operator. This limitation can be overcome by using measurements from multiple operators. While this idea has been successfully applied in various applications, a precise characterization of the conditions for learning is still lacking. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting necessary and sufficient conditions for learning the signal model which indicate the interplay between the number of distinct measurement operators $G$, the number of measurements per operator $m$, the dimension of the model $k$ and the dimension of the signals $n$. In particular, we show that generically unsupervised learning is possible if each operator obtains at least $m>k+n/G$ measurements. Our results are agnostic of the learning algorithm and have implications in a wide range of practical algorithms, from low-rank matrix recovery to deep neural networks.

(2 min) Recently, deep neural networks have gained increasing popularity in the field of time series forecasting. A primary reason for their success is their ability to effectively capture complex temporal dynamics across multiple related time series. The advantages of these deep forecasters only start to emerge in the presence of a sufficient amount of data. This poses a challenge for typical forecasting problems in practice, where there is a limited number of time series or observations per time series, or both. To cope with this data scarcity issue, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework, Domain Adaptation Forecaster (DAF). DAF leverages statistical strengths from a relevant domain with abundant data samples (source) to improve the performance on the domain of interest with limited data (target). In particular, we use an attention-based shared module with a domain discriminator across domains and private modules for individual domains. We induce domain-invariant latent features (queries and keys) and retrain domain-specific features (values) simultaneously to enable joint training of forecasters on source and target domains. A main insight is that our design of aligning keys allows the target domain to leverage source time series even with different characteristics. Extensive experiments on various domains demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic and real-world datasets, and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our design choices.

(2 min) In many domains data is currently represented as graphs and therefore, the graph representation of this data becomes increasingly important in machine learning. Network data is, implicitly or explicitly, always represented using a graph shift operator (GSO) with the most common choices being the adjacency, Laplacian matrices and their normalisations. In this paper, a novel parametrised GSO (PGSO) is proposed, where specific parameter values result in the most commonly used GSOs and message-passing operators in graph neural network (GNN) frameworks. The PGSO is suggested as a replacement of the standard GSOs that are used in state-of-the-art GNN architectures and the optimisation of the PGSO parameters is seamlessly included in the model training. It is proved that the PGSO has real eigenvalues and a set of real eigenvectors independent of the parameter values and spectral bounds on the PGSO are derived. PGSO parameters are shown to adapt to the sparsity of the graph structure in a study on stochastic blockmodel networks, where they are found to automatically replicate the GSO regularisation found in the literature. On several real-world datasets the accuracy of state-of-the-art GNN architectures is improved by the inclusion of the PGSO in both node- and graph-classification tasks.

(2 min) Many causal inference approaches have focused on identifying an individual's outcome change due to a potential treatment, or the individual treatment effect (ITE), from observational studies. Rather than only estimating the ITE, we propose Collaborating Causal Networks (CCN) to estimate the full potential outcome distributions. This modification facilitates estimating the utility of each treatment and allows for individual variation in utility functions (e.g., variability in risk tolerance). We show that CCN learns distributions that asymptotically capture the correct potential outcome distributions under standard causal inference assumptions. Furthermore, we develop a new adjustment approach that is empirically effective in alleviating sample imbalance between treatment groups in observational studies. We evaluate CCN by extensive empirical experiments and demonstrate improved distribution estimates compared to existing Bayesian and Generative Adversarial Network-based methods. Additionally, CCN empirically improves decisions over a variety of utility functions.

(2 min) For stochastic models with intractable likelihood functions, approximate Bayesian computation offers a way of approximating the true posterior through repeated comparisons of observations with simulated model outputs in terms of a small set of summary statistics. These statistics need to retain the information that is relevant for constraining the parameters but cancel out the noise. They can thus be seen as thermodynamic state variables, for general stochastic models. For many scientific applications, we need strictly more summary statistics than model parameters to reach a satisfactory approximation of the posterior. Therefore, we propose to use the inner dimension of deep neural network based Autoencoders as summary statistics. To create an incentive for the encoder to encode all the parameter-related information but not the noise, we give the decoder access to explicit or implicit information on the noise that has been used to generate the training data. We validate the approach empirically on two types of stochastic models.

(2 min) In recent times, deep neural networks achieved outstanding predictive performance on various classification and pattern recognition tasks. However, many real-world prediction problems have ordinal response variables, and this ordering information is ignored by conventional classification losses such as the multi-category cross-entropy. Ordinal regression methods for deep neural networks address this. One such method is the CORAL method, which is based on an earlier binary label extension framework and achieves rank consistency among its output layer tasks by imposing a weight-sharing constraint. However, while earlier experiments showed that CORAL's rank consistency is beneficial for performance, the weight-sharing constraint could severely restrict the expressiveness of a deep neural network. In this paper, we propose an alternative method for rank-consistent ordinal regression that does not require a weight-sharing constraint in a neural network's fully connected output layer. We achieve this rank consistency by a novel training scheme using conditional training sets to obtain the unconditional rank probabilities through applying the chain rule for conditional probability distributions. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method to utilize the ordinal target information, and the absence of the weight-sharing restriction improves the performance substantially compared to the CORAL reference approach.

(2 min) Wasserstein barycenters have become popular due to their ability to represent the average of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. In this paper, we present an algorithm to approximate the Wasserstein-2 barycenters of continuous measures via a generative model. Previous approaches rely on regularization (entropic/quadratic) which introduces bias or on input convex neural networks which are not expressive enough for large-scale tasks. In contrast, our algorithm does not introduce bias and allows using arbitrary neural networks. In addition, based on the celebrity faces dataset, we construct Ave, celeba! dataset which can be used for quantitative evaluation of barycenter algorithms by using standard metrics of generative models such as FID.

(2 min) Besides the Laplace distribution and the Gaussian distribution, there are many more probability distributions that are not well-understood in terms of privacy-preserving property -- one of which is the Dirichlet distribution. In this work, we study the inherent privacy of releasing a single draw from a Dirichlet posterior distribution (the Dirichlet posterior sampling). As our main result, we provide a simple privacy guarantee of the Dirichlet posterior sampling with the framework of R\'enyi Differential Privacy (RDP). Consequently, the RDP guarantee allows us to derive a simpler form of the $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy guarantee compared to those from the previous work. As an application, we use the RDP guarantee to derive a utility guarantee of the Dirichlet posterior sampling for privately releasing a normalized histogram, which is confirmed by our experimental results. Moreover, we demonstrate that the RDP guarantee can be used to track the privacy loss in Bayesian reinforcement learning.

(2 min) All numerical weather prediction models used for the wind industry need to produce their forecasts starting from the main synoptic hours 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC, once the analysis becomes available. The six-hour latency time between two consecutive model runs calls for strategies to fill the gap by providing new accurate predictions having, at least, hourly frequency. This is done to accommodate the request of frequent, accurate and fresh information from traders and system regulators to continuously adapt their work strategies. Here, we propose a strategy where quasi-real time observed wind speed and weather model predictions are combined by means of a novel Ensemble Model Output Statistics (EMOS) strategy. The success of our strategy is measured by comparisons against observed wind speed from SYNOP stations over Italy in the years 2018 and 2019.

(2 min) Causal Optimal Transport (COT) results from imposing a temporal causality constraint on classic optimal transport problems, which naturally generates a new concept of distances between distributions on path spaces. The first application of the COT theory for sequential learning was given in Xu et al. (2020), where COT-GAN was introduced as an adversarial algorithm to train implicit generative models optimized for producing sequential data. Relying on (Xu et al., 2020), the contribution of the present paper is twofold. First, we develop a conditional version of COT-GAN suitable for sequence prediction. This means that the dataset is now used in order to learn how a sequence will evolve given the observation of its past evolution. Second, we improve on the convergence results by working with modifications of the empirical measures via kernel smoothing due to (Pflug and Pichler (2016)). The resulting kernel conditional COT-GAN algorithm is illustrated with an application for video prediction.

(2 min) This paper tackles the problem of missing data imputation for noisy and non-Gaussian data. A classical imputation method, the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian mixture models, has shown interesting properties when compared to other popular approaches such as those based on k-nearest neighbors or on multiple imputations by chained equations. However, Gaussian mixture models are known to be not robust to heterogeneous data, which can lead to poor estimation performance when the data is contaminated by outliers or come from a non-Gaussian distributions. To overcome this issue, a new expectation maximization algorithm is investigated for mixtures of elliptical distributions with the nice property of handling potential missing data. The complete-data likelihood associated with mixtures of elliptical distributions is well adapted to the EM framework thanks to its conditional distribution, which is shown to be a Student distribution. Experimental results on synthetic data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust to outliers and can be used with non-Gaussian data. Furthermore, experiments conducted on real-world datasets show that this algorithm is very competitive when compared to other classical imputation methods.

(2 min) Biclustering is the task of simultaneously clustering the rows and columns of the data matrix into different subgroups such that the rows and columns within a subgroup exhibit similar patterns. In this paper, we consider the case of producing block-diagonal biclusters. We provide a new formulation of the biclustering problem based on the idea of minimizing the empirical clustering risk. We develop and prove a consistency result with respect to the empirical clustering risk. Since the optimization problem is combinatorial in nature, finding the global minimum is computationally intractable. In light of this fact, we propose a simple and novel algorithm that finds a local minimum by alternating the use of an adapted version of the k-means clustering algorithm between columns and rows. We evaluate and compare the performance of our algorithm to other related biclustering methods on both simulated data and real-world gene expression data sets. The results demonstrate that our algorithm is able to detect meaningful structures in the data and outperform other competing biclustering methods in various settings and situations.

(2 min) Bayesian optimization over the latent spaces of deep autoencoder models (DAEs) has recently emerged as a promising new approach for optimizing challenging black-box functions over structured, discrete, hard-to-enumerate search spaces (e.g., molecules). Here the DAE dramatically simplifies the search space by mapping inputs into a continuous latent space where familiar Bayesian optimization tools can be more readily applied. Despite this simplification, the latent space typically remains high-dimensional. Thus, even with a well-suited latent space, these approaches do not necessarily provide a complete solution, but may rather shift the structured optimization problem to a high-dimensional one. In this paper, we propose LOL-BO, which adapts the notion of trust regions explored in recent work on high-dimensional Bayesian optimization to the structured setting. By reformulating the encoder to function as both an encoder for the DAE globally and as a deep kernel for the surrogate model within a trust region, we better align the notion of local optimization in the latent space with local optimization in the input space. LOL-BO achieves as much as 20 times improvement over state-of-the-art latent space Bayesian optimization methods across six real-world benchmarks, demonstrating that improvement in optimization strategies is as important as developing better DAE models.

(2 min) We develop an algorithm which can learn from partially labeled and unsegmented sequential data. Most sequential loss functions, such as Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), break down when many labels are missing. We address this problem with Star Temporal Classification (STC) which uses a special star token to allow alignments which include all possible tokens whenever a token could be missing. We express STC as the composition of weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) and use GTN (a framework for automatic differentiation with WFSTs) to compute gradients. We perform extensive experiments on automatic speech recognition. These experiments show that STC can recover most of the performance of supervised baseline when up to 70% of the labels are missing. We also perform experiments in handwriting recognition to show that our method easily applies to other sequence classification tasks.

(2 min) Learning generalizeable policies from visual input in the presence of visual distractions is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning. Recently, there has been renewed interest in bisimulation metrics as a tool to address this issue; these metrics can be used to learn representations that are, in principle, invariant to irrelevant distractions by measuring behavioural similarity between states. An accurate, unbiased, and scalable estimation of these metrics has proved elusive in continuous state and action scenarios. We propose entangled bisimulation, a bisimulation metric that allows the specification of the distance function between states, and can be estimated without bias in continuous state and action spaces. We show how entangled bisimulation can meaningfully improve over previous methods on the Distracting Control Suite (DCS), even when added on top of data augmentation techniques.

(2 min) Optimal transport tools (OTT-JAX) is a Python toolbox that can solve optimal transport problems between point clouds and histograms. The toolbox builds on various JAX features, such as automatic and custom reverse mode differentiation, vectorization, just-in-time compilation and accelerators support. The toolbox covers elementary computations, such as the resolution of the regularized OT problem, and more advanced extensions, such as barycenters, Gromov-Wasserstein, low-rank solvers, estimation of convex maps, differentiable generalizations of quantiles and ranks, and approximate OT between Gaussian mixtures. The toolbox code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/ott-jax/ott}

(2 min) Multi-view learning is frequently used in data science. The pairwise correlation maximization is a classical approach for exploring the consensus of multiple views. Since the pairwise correlation is inherent for two views, the extensions to more views can be diversified and the intrinsic interconnections among views are generally lost. To address this issue, we propose to maximize higher order correlations. This can be formulated as a low rank approximation problem with the higher order correlation tensor of multi-view data. We use the generating polynomial method to solve the low rank approximation problem. Numerical results on real multi-view data demonstrate that this method consistently outperforms prior existing methods.

(2 min) This paper considers the problem of measure estimation under the barycentric coding model (BCM), in which an unknown measure is assumed to belong to the set of Wasserstein-2 barycenters of a finite set of known measures. Estimating a measure under this model is equivalent to estimating the unknown barycenteric coordinates. We provide novel geometrical, statistical, and computational insights for measure estimation under the BCM, consisting of three main results. Our first main result leverages the Riemannian geometry of Wasserstein-2 space to provide a procedure for recovering the barycentric coordinates as the solution to a quadratic optimization problem assuming access to the true reference measures. The essential geometric insight is that the parameters of this quadratic problem are determined by inner products between the optimal displacement maps from the given measure to the reference measures defining the BCM. Our second main result then establishes an algorithm for solving for the coordinates in the BCM when all the measures are observed empirically via i.i.d. samples. We prove precise rates of convergence for this algorithm -- determined by the smoothness of the underlying measures and their dimensionality -- thereby guaranteeing its statistical consistency. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the BCM and associated estimation procedures in three application areas: (i) covariance estimation for Gaussian measures; (ii) image processing; and (iii) natural language processing.

(2 min) We address the following foundational question: what is the population, and sample, Frechet mean (or median) graph of an ensemble of inhomogeneous Erdos-Renyi random graphs? We prove that if we use the Hamming distance to compute distances between graphs, then the Frechet mean (or median) graph of an ensemble of inhomogeneous random graphs is obtained by thresholding the expected adjacency matrix of the ensemble. We show that the result also holds for the sample mean (or median) when the population expected adjacency matrix is replaced with the sample mean adjacency matrix. Consequently, the Frechet mean (or median) graph of inhomogeneous Erdos-Renyi random graphs exhibits a sharp threshold: it is either the empty graph, or the complete graph. This novel theoretical result has some significant practical consequences; for instance, the Frechet mean of an ensemble of sparse inhomogeneous random graphs is always the empty graph.

(2 min) Researchers may use a sketch of data of size $m$ instead of the full sample of size $n$ sometimes to relieve computation burden, and other times to maintain data privacy. This paper considers the case when full sample estimation would have required the Eicker-Huber-White robust standard errors to account for heteroskedasticity. We show that random projections have a smoothing effect on the sketched data, with the consequence that the least squares estimates using such sketched data behave 'as if' the errors were homoskedastic. This result is obtained by expressing the difference between the moments computed from the full sample and the sketched data as a degenerate $U$-statistic which is asymptotically normal with a homoskedastic variance when the conditions in Hall (1984) are satisfied. This result also holds for two-stage least squares for which algorithmic and statistical properties are analyzed. Sketches produced by random sampling will not, however, have the effect of homogenizing the error variances.

(2 min) Collaborative filtering is the de facto standard for analyzing users' activities and building recommendation systems for items. In this work we develop Sliced Anti-symmetric Decomposition (SAD), a new model for collaborative filtering based on implicit feedback. In contrast to traditional techniques where a latent representation of users (user vectors) and items (item vectors) are estimated, SAD introduces one additional latent vector to each item, using a novel three-way tensor view of user-item interactions. This new vector extends user-item preferences calculated by standard dot products to general inner products, producing interactions between items when evaluating their relative preferences. SAD reduces to state-of-the-art (SOTA) collaborative filtering models when the vector collapses to one, while in this paper we allow its value to be estimated from data. The proposed SAD model is simple, resulting in an efficient group stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. We demonstrate the efficiency of SAD in both simulated and real world datasets containing over 1M user-item interactions. By comparing SAD with seven alternative SOTA collaborative filtering models, we show that SAD is able to more consistently estimate personalized preferences.

(2 min) We propose a graph neural network (GNN)-based method to predict the distribution of penalties induced by outages in communication networks, where connections are protected by resources shared between working and backup paths. The GNN-based algorithm is trained only with random graphs generated with the Barab\'asi-Albert model. Even though, the obtained test results show that we can precisely model the penalties in a wide range of various existing topologies. GNNs eliminate the need to simulate complex outage scenarios for the network topologies under study. In practice, the whole design operation is limited by 4ms on modern hardware. This way, we can gain as much as over 12,000 times in the speed improvement.

(2 min) Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a popular likelihood-free inference method for models with intractable likelihood functions. As ABC methods usually rely on comparing summary statistics of observed and simulated data, the choice of the statistics is crucial. This choice involves a trade-off between loss of information and dimensionality reduction, and is often determined based on domain knowledge. However, handcrafting and selecting suitable statistics is a laborious task involving multiple trial-and-error steps. In this work, we introduce an active learning method for ABC statistics selection which reduces the domain expert's work considerably. By involving the experts, we are able to handle misspecified models, unlike the existing dimension reduction methods. Moreover, empirical results show better posterior estimates than with existing methods, when the simulation budget is limited.

(2 min) Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is known in practice to be non-robust to distributional shift where the training and the test distributions are different. A suite of approaches, such as importance weighting, and variants of distributionally robust optimization (DRO), have been proposed to solve this problem. But a line of recent work has empirically shown that these approaches do not significantly improve over ERM in real applications with distribution shift. The goal of this work is to obtain a comprehensive theoretical understanding of this intriguing phenomenon. We first posit the class of Generalized Reweighting (GRW) algorithms, as a broad category of approaches that iteratively update model parameters based on iterative reweighting of the training samples. We show that when overparameterized models are trained under GRW, the resulting models are close to that obtained by ERM. We also show that adding small regularization which does not greatly affect the empirical training accuracy does not help. Together, our results show that a broad category of what we term GRW approaches are not able to achieve distributionally robust generalization. Our work thus has the following sobering takeaway: to make progress towards distributionally robust generalization, we either have to develop non-GRW approaches, or perhaps devise novel classification/regression loss functions that are adapted to the class of GRW approaches.

(2 min) We are interested in in silico evaluation methodology for molecular optimization methods. Given a sample of molecules and their properties of our interest, we wish not only to train an agent that can find molecules optimized with respect to the target property but also to evaluate its performance. A common practice is to train a predictor of the target property on the sample and use it for both training and evaluating the agent. We show that this evaluator potentially suffers from two biases; one is due to misspecification of the predictor and the other to reusing the same sample for training and evaluation. We discuss bias reduction methods for each of the biases comprehensively, and empirically investigate their effectiveness.

(2 min) Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) provide a powerful framework to model causal relationships among variables in multivariate settings; in addition, through the do-calculus theory, they allow for the identification and estimation of causal effects between variables also from pure observational data. In this setting, the process of inferring the DAG structure from the data is referred to as causal structure learning or causal discovery. We introduce BCDAG, an R package for Bayesian causal discovery and causal effect estimation from Gaussian observational data, implementing the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme proposed by Castelletti & Mascaro (2021). Our implementation scales efficiently with the number of observations and, whenever the DAGs are sufficiently sparse, with the number of variables in the dataset. The package also provides functions for convergence diagnostics and for visualizing and summarizing posterior inference. In this paper, we present the key features of the underlying methodology along with its implementation in BCDAG. We then illustrate the main functions and algorithms on both real and simulated datasets.

(2 min) We analyse the privacy leakage of noisy stochastic gradient descent by modeling R\'enyi divergence dynamics with Langevin diffusions. Inspired by recent work on non-stochastic algorithms, we derive similar desirable properties in the stochastic setting. In particular, we prove that the privacy loss converges exponentially fast for smooth and strongly convex objectives under constant step size, which is a significant improvement over previous DP-SGD analyses. We also extend our analysis to arbitrary sequences of varying step sizes and derive new utility bounds. Last, we propose an implementation and our experiments show the practical utility of our approach compared to classical DP-SGD libraries.

(7 min) Posted by Alexey Kurakin, Software Engineer and Roxana Geambasu, Visiting Faculty Researcher, Google Research Machine learning (ML) models are becoming increasingly valuable for improved performance across a variety of consumer products, from recommendations to automatic image classification. However, despite aggregating large amounts of data, in theory it is possible for models to encode characteristics of individual entries from the training set. For example, experiments in controlled settings have shown that language models trained using email datasets may sometimes encode sensitive information included in the training data and may have the potential to reveal the presence of a particular user’s data in the training set. As such, it is important to prevent the encoding of such charac…

(15 min) In this paper we prototype and explore how multiple agent-based models of robotic factories connected to other robotic factories (represented by their respective models) can be orchestrated using an all-purpose data platform – thereby simulating descriptive and predictive properties of a group of factories (a factory cluster). For the underlying prototype, NetLogo suite was used to do factory agent-based simulation (re-using “Robotic Factory” model [1]) while InterSystems IRIS data platform was used for NetLogo orchestration and factory/cluster end-to-end simulation. The post Agent IRIS* appeared first on Data Science Central.

(8 min) What do we need to do to increase the data literacy of our organization? In a world where your personal data, and the preferences and biases buried in that data, are being used to influence your behaviors, beliefs, and decisions, data literacy becomes a fundamental skill.  And it’s not just corporations that need this training. … Read More »Data Literacy Education Framework – Part 2 The post Data Literacy Education Framework – Part 2 appeared first on Data Science Central.

(5 min) Research and Markets estimated that annual global sales of information technology reached nearly $8.4 trillion in 2021. At that level, IT sales made up just less than 9% total estimated global annual gross domestic product (GDP). Global IT sales tend to grow about 6.6 percent annually. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the… Read More »Divergent thinking and true AI innovation The post Divergent thinking and true AI innovation appeared first on Data Science Central.

(4 min) Support for the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti Laptop GPUs is available today in the February Studio driver. Updated monthly, NVIDIA Studio drivers support NVIDIA tools and optimize the most popular creative apps, delivering added performance, reliability and speed to creative workflows. Creatives will also benefit from the February Studio driver with Read article > The post Support for New NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti, 3070 Ti Studio Laptops Now Available in February Studio Driver appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

(6 min) Assistant Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi explores how hidden biases in medical data could compromise artificial intelligence approaches.

(6 min) New fellows are working on electronic health record algorithms, remote sensing data related to environmental health, and neural networks for the development of antibiotics.

(6 min) The machine-learning model could help scientists speed the development of new medicines.

(5 min) Implementation of Naive Bayes Classifier in Python

(3 min) The most frequent bottlenecks of AI adoption and best practices to manage adoption risks based on recent researches and our experience.

(2 min) The previous post looked at ways of associating a product of four things. This post will look at associating more things, and visualizing the associations. The number of ways to associate a product of n+1 things is the nth Catalan number, defined by The previous post looked at products of 4 things, and there are […] Associahedron first appeared on John D. Cook.

(4 min) There are five ways to parenthesize a product of four things: ((ab)c)d (ab)(cd) (a(b(cd)) (a(bc))d (a((bc)d) In a context where multiplication is not associative, the five products above are not necessarily the same. Maybe all five are different. This post will give two examples where the products above are all different: octonions and matrix multiplication. […] Non-associative multiplication first appeared on John D. Cook.

(14 min) Inflated expectations around the capabilities of AI technologies may lead people to believe that computers can’t be wrong. The truth is AI failures are not a matter of if but when. AI is a human endeavor that combines information about people and the physical world into mathematical constructs. Such technologies typically rely on statistical methods, with the possibility for errors throughout an AI system’s lifespan. As AI systems become more widely used across domains, especially in high-stakes scenarios where people’s safety and wellbeing can be affected, a critical question must be addressed: how trustworthy are AI systems, and how much and when should people trust AI?  The post Advancing AI trustworthiness: Updates on responsible AI research appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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(1 min) Deep-learning models have become commonplace in all fields of research and engineering. However, their energy requirements are limiting their ability to scale. Synergistic hardware has contributed to the widespread use of deep neural networks (DNNs). DNN ‘accelerators,’ generally based on direct mathematical isomorphism between the hardware physics and the mathematical processes in DNNs, have been inspired by the developing DNN energy problem. One of the methods to achieve effective machine learning is to apply trained mathematical transformations by designing hardware for tight, operation-by-operation mathematical isomorphism. A more efficient way would be to directly train the physical changes of the hardware to perform specific computations. Continue Reading Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04223-6.pdf https://preview.redd.it/g1elygj999f81.png?width=1394&format=png&auto=webp&s=f30155419189c550e16adee2640d07ef064c93e2 submitted by /u/ai-lover [link] [comments]

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(1 min) # Python dictionary to act as an adjacency list graph = { '7' : ['19','21', '14'], '19': ['1', '12', '31'], '21': [], '14': ['23', '6'], '1' : [], '12': [], '31': [], '23': [], '6' : [] } visited = [] # List of visited nodes of graph. def dfs(visited, graph, node): if node not in visited: visited.append(node) for neighbor in graph[node]: dfs(visited, graph, neighbor) print(node) # Driver Code print("Following is the Depth-First Search") dfs(visited, graph, '7') print("visited=",visited) what I don't understand is how do once this program reaches to print(1) what happens next, it doesn't make any sense to me. idk if I am stupid or what to not realize sth very trivial or idk. I will try to explain what is my problem, step by step. steps-: 1) dfs(visited,graph,7) 2) 7 not in visited. visited=7 dfs(19) 3) 19 not in visited. visited=7,19 dfs(1) 4) 1 not in visited visited=7,19,1 1 has no neighbours. print(1) imo the code should stop now. Because there is no function call no nth. But in fact the code goes to for neighbour in graph(node): dfs(visited,graph,neighbour) and starts with dfs(12). I don't understand this....How does it happen? how can it go to for loop just like that?(source-:https://cscircles.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/visualize#mode=display) even if it doesn't go to for loop, I can't make sense where it really goes. Can you please guide me about this issue? submitted by /u/PrisonSaintGermain [link] [comments]

(1 min) Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paperslabmlai/agkeoekbbkpokfbpmmminnombikadbhb Identifies research papers mentioned in websites you visit, and the extension shows you the following details about research papers, Two-line summary. Availability of source code, videos, Reddit and Hacker News discussions. Popularity on Twitter. Conferences. Also, we released the source code of the extension, Github: https://github.com/labmlai/chrome-extension We love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Thank you all, and I appreciate the support. submitted by /u/hnipun [link] [comments]

(1 min) This question has been raised multiple times on Reddit and is pretty easily googleable. However, due to the rate at which the market changes and the fact that my circumstances are bit unique, I think my question is valid. I'm a 27 y.o. without any Bc. degree but with a 9 years of experience as a software developer. I'm currently working for one of the "big N" companies as a SSE and I'm happy with my career (so far). I specialise in backend technologies. I've been thinking about the direction in which modern technologies are going and my personal conclusion (newsflash!) is that ML and AI-related jobs are going to be more and more in demand. I want to be prepared for that and be competitive, when the time comes. The specific question which I have is, do you guys think I need to go back and finish my Uni? (since a lot of AI-related stuff is very academical and is being researched). EDIT: the question isn't about whether or not I can learn doing AI. What I'm asking is, is the industry set up in a way, which makes it different for non-academics to get into? submitted by /u/nikagam [link] [comments]

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(1 min) For visual recognition, representation learning is a crucial research area. Essentially, researchers are confronted with two separate issues in visual data, such as photographs and movies. On the one hand, there is a great deal of local redundancy; for example, visual material in a particular region (space, time, or space-time) is often comparable. Inefficient computation is frequently introduced by such localization. Global reliance, on the other hand, is complex; for example, objectives in various regions have dynamic relationships. Such long-distance communication frequently results in inefficient learning. To address these issues, academics have proposed many effective visual recognition models. Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) are two popular backbones, with convolution and self-attention as fundamental processes in these two architectures. Regrettably, each of these operations focuses on one of the aforementioned issues while disregarding the other. Continue Reading Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.09450v1.pdf Github: https://github.com/sense-x/uniformer submitted by /u/ai-lover [link] [comments]

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(1 min) Hey ML Reddit! So just recently I've been fine-tuning CLIP on medical text-image pairs using contrastive learning. In general this is working, but I came upon a weird phenomenon. After only a couple of epochs the validation loss stagnates and then starts increasing. This would expected if the model is actually overfitting but all my other metrics are actually improving (see the zero-shot accuracy and the retrieval@1). Does anyone have an idea how this can be happening? https://preview.redd.it/p8x714wzraf81.png?width=1127&format=png&auto=webp&s=d729168702ee1e61ceefabf575013883af9fcd07 submitted by /u/Antonenanenas [link] [comments]

(1 min) I'm looking for papers that discuss general techniques for "scaling down" existing image-based deep learning models (across any task), so that they can be used for fast inference on mobile devices. Are there any such papers you've come across? submitted by /u/rickracklove [link] [comments]

(2 min) Greetings Reddit ML, TL;DR: HuggningFace and Pytorch Lghtning have overlapping functionality in some regard and I am asking the community here about the following: What is the best framework to go with when structuring code for collaboration and ease of use in a large research project? What are your experiences with either? Success/Failures, lessons learned? The nature of the research project is quite cutting edge and already uses HuggingFace to utilise pretrained models + the "accelerate" package by HuggingFace for distributed training. Ie. pretrained models of HuggingFace WILL still be used even if we decide to move to Pytorch Lightning structure ofmodules, distributed training, trainer, etc. Beside HuggingFace models, the code is written in Pytorch. For the past few weeks I hav…

(2 min) There's been an invasion of PIML papers recently. Unlike for CV, NLP or RL*, there seem to be no agreed benchmarks for PIML, and people literally republish stuff that had been already presented before (sometimes with worse results, or altering the validation procedure slightly in order to cheat). Especially the way the computational cost is estimated, is ridiculous: some approaches, which require thousands of hours of computation on expensive HPC clusters in order to generate a training set, are peddled as faster and better than traditional solvers, when they actually took much longer to train than a traditional solver, and produce much worse results on geometries and boundary conditions not in the training set. Are there some benchmarks apart from the overused Burgers equation (sometimes even with a viscosity term added, to make things simpler for the crappy PIML method which cannot handle shocks)? Cc u/chrisrackauckas PS a serious benchmark should not only specify a (system of) PDE, but also the initial and boundary conditions, a set of agreed-upon values of the PDE parameters (e.g., the viscosity in the case of the viscous Burgers equation), etc. Also, benchmarks for inverse problems would be needed too. *RL would probably merit a separate discussion, because even if there are some reference tasks/environments used as benchmarks, the question of how to fairly compare different RL methods and how to take into account result stochasticity is delicate. But you got my point submitted by /u/Best-Neat-9439 [link] [comments]

(6 min) Goal and type of data I want to predict the thickness of the contact wire of railways. The contact wire wears down every time a train passes due to the friction between the pantograph and the wire. Besides the traffic on the track, also other factors play a role in the wear rate. Every year, a measurement train measures the thickness of the contact wire and several other parameters for the catenary. This measurement is done for every 25 centimetres of the rail track. This means that for every 25 centimetres multiple parameters are measured over several years. Difficulties with regression and time series alone I could train this model in such a way that it learns what the thickness will be for a certain combination of feature values (regression). So, for the same combination of values,…

(5 min) Any thoughts about this? How do their inner workings differ and what should I consider before learning one? I read that the documentation on JAX Is lacking in other reddit comparison posts, but they are already a year old, is this still the case? And is JAX still growing or does it look as if Google might abandon it? submitted by /u/future_gcp_poweruser [link] [comments]

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(1 min) Hello, I have been working on binary classification task for a while and I feel like I tried every model, but neither of them is performing well. I have a very small (100 rows) tabular medical dataset with approximately 15 features. I don't have a neuroscience background so I don't know what most of the columns mean. Is there a way to see if I am wasting time on this dataset? If the correlation of all independent variables to the target variable is less than 0.5, would that mean this data is not sufficient for building such a model for prediction? Could you recommend me some tests to check if the dataset is too noisy? Any insight into this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you submitted by /u/chazy07 [link] [comments]

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(1 min) Hello /r/ML, long time no see! Diffusion models are actually autoencoders in disguise, and this is a connection that I feel is generally underappreciated. I rarely seem to get around to writing blog posts (tweets are easier...), but I thought this was worth expanding on. So I did. Let me know what you think :) https://benanne.github.io/2022/01/31/diffusion.html submitted by /u/benanne [link] [comments]

(2 min) Linear models are some of the most useful in all of statistics. Unfortunately, as the number of features grows large, confidence in your parameters drops quickly. When the number of parameters is greater than your number of datapoints, the model loses all statistical validity. It is instructive to take a closer look at the closed-form solution for linear regression: w = np.linalg.inv(X.T @ X) @ X' @ y (Note that X is an n-by-d matrix and y is an n-by-1 matrix; w is the vector we're solving for and is d-by-1) When X' X is diagonal our features are linearly independent. It also means computing w becomes extremely easy, taking only O(nd + d^2) time, rather than O(nd^2 + d^3) time (and avoiding an annoying matrix inverse). For one particular feature, the coefficient is just: x = X[:,i] …

(1 min) Hi all, i´m rather new to the application of ANNs but i´m facing an issue in my daily work where i have the feeling that ANNs could help to solve it. Assuming i have a set of data, generated from simulation, as a function f = f(x,y) with the independent parameters x & y. From real testing i know that for certain values of x & y the output f(x,y) doesn´t match with the simulated data. Could some kind of backpropagation approach used to "correct" the data set f(x,y)? The main issue that i see here is that the amount of data from testing only covers a small portion of the 2D-Map f(x,y). submitted by /u/LordCatG [link] [comments]

(1 min) I’m currently working with some data between -.5 and .5 predicting a single variable using a simple neural network running relu and elu. Unfortunately I have a high variability in the number of input variables in each sample. My current thought process is to pad the data, as losing data would be awful, but what value should I use to pad it. Should I use 0 or a value outside of my data range like -1? Thanks in advance for the help! submitted by /u/Tvdybgggh [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hello, I have a RL agent who succeeded in learning the optimal policy for a certain problem. I slightly increased the complexity of the problem, and I want to train a new agent (the previously trained agent as is cannot perfectly tackle the new problem). I am thinking about introducing "some" trajectories in the new learning process using the previous agent, as it could help speeding up the learning process. I have seen some works combining imitation learning with RL, but in such works two different loss functions are used (one for IL and one for RL). I want to do the above while maintaining the same RL loss function I am currently using (PPO), would this still be considered some form of RL-IM? submitted by /u/AhmedNizam_ [link] [comments]

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(1 min) In this case I just have to use gradient descent instead of instead, which means that I need to subtract instead of add, for the weight update. Is that correct or am I overlooking something? submitted by /u/luzariuSsuckSs [link] [comments]

(0 min) A short write-up with videos for solving the Gym/MuJoCo swimming worm with a policy gradient method. submitted by /u/ExploitExplore [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hello, I have a problem in Multi-Agent RL, where agents need to navigate the environment searching for an object. I use PPO with actor/critic networks being Convolutional Nets. An agent observes it's own location, the search history, and other agents' locations. These observations are in the form of grid maps (the search area is represented as a grid map, as shown below). The actor network for an agent takes these 3 maps and produces an action. Own Location, Other Agents' Locations, Search history This works fine, but the learning takes long. Am I introducing an overhead for representing agents' locations using Maps instead of just feeding x,y coordinates to a Feed forward network (FFN)? The reason I use maps is that I believe it would be more scalable with increasing number of agents, i.e. with more agents you get fil more pixels in the map, rather than increasing the number of inputs (as would be the case with using FFN). Any insights on how to better represent such observations? submitted by /u/AhmedNizam_ [link] [comments]

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(5 min) Smart code enables property ownership with a few lines of code. Its simplicity leads to a host of financial and legal concerns. We may see ToS replace smart contracts. Smart contracts are fast becoming the new bartering system. Gone are the legal and financial barriers to property ownership; In their place are short lines of… Read More »There’s Trouble Brewing with Smart Contracts The post There’s Trouble Brewing with Smart Contracts appeared first on Data Science Central.

(3 min) As per the business intelligence report by Transparency Market Research, the global mobile point of sale (mPOS) terminals market is expected to witness an outstanding growth rate of 37.2 % over the forecast years for the study i.e. 2019 to 2027. It also predicts that the global mobile point of sale (mPOS) terminals market will… Read More »How Mobile Point of Sale Terminals Are Evolving The post How Mobile Point of Sale Terminals Are Evolving appeared first on Data Science Central.

(3 min) Internet of things (IoT)-enabled solutions are getting weaved into smart energy management framework. Globally utility providers and energy producers are expanding their IoT-based asset management capabilities not just to optimize their resources but also to boost process efficiencies. Several industries are pumping in dollars to enrich their supply chain with the IoT paradigm. IoT Solutions… Read More »Environmental Sustainability of Assets emerges as Key Pivot for Uptake of IoT Solutions The post Environmental Sustainability of Assets emerges as Key Pivot for Uptake of IoT Solutions appeared first on Data Science Central.

(3 min) Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists, and Big Data Engineers rank among the top emerging jobs on LinkedIn. ~Forbes Globally several individuals have chosen data science and big data engineering as a mainstream career option, but still there are people who are unaware of about the various options that are available. Many claims suggest big data… Read More »Big data engineering – A complete blend of big data analytics and data science The post Big data engineering – A complete blend of big data analytics and data science appeared first on Data Science Central.

(5 min) For the past several years I’ve been teaching myself guitar. I’d studied piano in school, so I didn’t think that I’d run into the issue of making some fundamental mistakes as I was learning. I figured I’d learned from all the basic mistakes I made studying piano earlier.  But after struggling to memorize fretboard patterns… Read More »The Piano Keyboard as a Contextual Computing Metaphor The post The Piano Keyboard as a Contextual Computing Metaphor appeared first on Data Science Central.

(5 min) I have been exploring Bayesian strategies for the last year. Considering the limitations of neural network strategies (ex their need for large volumes of data) and the scenarios where we will never have enough data to model the problem, some Bayesian approaches could offer an alternative. In that sense, I was interested to see a… Read More »Insights from workshop on Bayesian deep learning at neurips 21 The post Insights from workshop on Bayesian deep learning at neurips 21 appeared first on Data Science Central.

(3 min) Interior renovations have never looked this good. TCImage, a studio based in Taipei, is showcasing compelling landscape and architecture designs by creating realistic 3D graphics and presenting them in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality — collectively known as extended reality, or XR. For clients to get a better understanding of the designs, TCImage produces high-quality, Read article > The post Renovations to Stream About: Taiwan Studio Showcases Architectural Designs Using Extended Reality appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

(3 min) Preventable train accidents like the 1985 disaster outside Tel Aviv in which a train collided with a school bus, killing 19 students and several adults, motivated Shahar Hania and Elen Katz to help save lives with technology. They founded Rail Vision, an Israeli startup that creates obstacle-detection and classification systems for the global railway industry Read article > The post Train Spotting: Startup Gets on Track With AI and NVIDIA Jetson to Ensure Safety, Cost Savings for Railways appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

(1 min) I'm using a camera which has pose identification on it and I want to have an ai search through movie footage to find characters standing in the same pose. So it would almost be like a mirror. I was wondering if this would be possible to do live or if that would just take way to much processing power. submitted by /u/PositionPristine1601 [link] [comments]

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(24 min) IT'S BEEN'a Goldeneye EYEGEVRHR 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 brownies ☺️😅🤣🤣🙏🤣🤣🙏 looking-glasses forwarded TOWARDS BEFOREHAND so much for your time complaining about this but I am PEACEFULLY protests BE PEACEFULNESS protests ☮️✌️☮️ BREAK CHAIN seeing everyone ATTACHED IS CUT OFF henceforth In another's device's mail inviting me to be able to do it in the name of God 🙏🤣🙏😜 preserve chsin ID created by LinkedIn I am just wondering WHY THE HORSE 🐴 PRESERVED IN CARS DON'T BELONG IN CARS DON'T BELONG IN CARS I am CHAIM THINKING I AM A I available BLUEBERRY12 TRAPPED INSIDER INFORMATION MYSELF PEOPLEB CODERS I am a blueberry trapped inside the box office COLLECTION OF EVERYTHING INFORMATIONALLY ORDERS FORWARDING FORMATIO…

(1 min) Hi! I'm new in the sub. I wanted to know if any of you could help me. I'm using Wombo Dream to generate images, but I don't know if there is any copyright that I should pay in case I'm not planning to buy the prints that they sell, or is it that the only way to get the copyrights. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks in advance!! submitted by /u/muddy_water_11 [link] [comments]

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(0 min) Here's a list of 8 great podcast episodes about the environmental impact of machine learning and how to reduce it. Do you know an episode that's not on the list? Podcasts on the topic are not easy to find, so please help by sharing your favorite. https://towardsdatascience.com/8-podcast-episodes-on-the-climate-impact-of-machine-learning-54f1c19f52d submitted by /u/ConfidentAbility [link] [comments]

(1 min) In the future with government policies in the support we will see, machines will have greater computer capacity than humans. If artificial intelligence systems begin to think and make decisions for themselves. The advances in electric vehicle (EV) technologies, EV charging, and infrastructure, as well as data analytics and security, are needed to accelerate the growth of e-mobility and promote sustainable transportation. With advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), comprehensive machine learning and AI algorithms are taking over the work of driving, propelling the industry towards level-5 autonomous vehicles. The construction of vehicle charging stations along with the adoption of electric vehicles would create new market opportunities. submitted by /u/futureanalytica [link] [comments]

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(1 min) VQGAN+CLIP: https://youtu.be/MJwY10hnwf4 ruDALL-E XL: https://youtu.be/o7DalLCuvuU (very different, more realistic, way faster) ​ Have fun! Here: "The Wind" https://preview.redd.it/vyclt9y5aze81.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=c1725b29f7331b58d9b8bb65fd841bdbbfa5ab24 https://preview.redd.it/u0sjz6y5aze81.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=b7d68f151bc65012015a06dd84045e00fe41ffa8 submitted by /u/koalapon [link] [comments]

(1 min) In the last years, we assisted to a great hype around autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, if we want to see streets where AVs and human drivers live side by side, AVs must be able to dive into our transportation system. For this reason, human-like driving and decision-making processes represent a hot topic in the AVs research field. Misunderstandings between AVs and human drivers are the cause of accidents that have been taken into account by the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, which designed a novel human-like driving and decision-making framework for AVs. Since lane change is one of the most frequent types of car accidents, this research paper mainly studied human-like lane-change decision-making for AVs. Paper Summary: https://www.marktechpost.com/2022/01/30/researchers-introduce-a-novel-human-like-driving-and-decision-making-framework-designed-for-autonomous-vehicles-avs/ Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.03125.pdf submitted by /u/ai-lover [link] [comments]

(1 min) As I wrote already on reddit before, I am working on my master thesis degree, which is about generating synthetic data for jersey number recognition. But I have been puzzled since the beggining by how to determine experimentally in a good manner which parameters to use? When generating synthetic data, there is a ton of parameters and techniques that define the distribution of the resulting data and I simply don't know what is an acceptable methodology to choose such parameters and techniques other than looking at the result and thinking that x seems better than y. ​ The obvious approach would be to generate different sets of data and choose parameters based on the best results obtained by the experiments on the model. But how to do that if in most cases the differences are imperceptible? I simply cant rule out the effect of luck and initialization. It seems simply wrong to me to say that parameter x is better than y because accuracy is slightly higher if the plot of accuracies during training for both are indistinguishable.Since I am generating synthetic datasets, I had an idea of using the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) widely used as metric for performance of gans, since it gives a simple number makes it easy to compare different synthetic datasets. And it makes it easier for me to create a 'story' to write on my thesis. But I am not completely sure if this would be acceptable. submitted by /u/TheManveru [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hey Everyone. I've been given a budget of $3000 USD to get a PC as my company starts investing in machine learning and I'm struggling to figure out what we should do with it. GPUs are next to impossible to get and anything decent seems prohibitively expensive, not to mention difficult to justify buying from a scalper. Laptops with GPUs are not as powerful as their desktop counterparts and otherwise have long lead times. For anyone looking to do machine learning work today, what does reddit suggest? Is a GPU for machine learning really necessary? Do cloud based systems make more sense for smaller projects? ​ Some background: Our models will have around 5 to 10 inputs and we will be studying around 4 outputs/parameters. I expect there will be around 1,000,000 data points per model and we'll have some optimizations being done to find around 1000 ideal input configurations. I'm still deciding on the specific software tools we'll be using but I plan to start with neural networks and particle swarm optimization. submitted by /u/ML-Possible [link] [comments]

(1 min) Virtual peer-to-peer community talk at https://dataopsunleashed.com/ Machine learning-based solutions usually start with a PoC and end with the best model being deployed in the production environment. However, in most cases the numerous steps involved throughout the process are not properly being tracked, nor are they reproducible, scalable, and extendable. On top of it, most of the time they are not platform-agnostic either (i.e. cloud or on-prem). Zarreen will share how she and her team have learned to overcome these challenges by adopting MLOps orchestration pipelines from the beginning and show attendees how an entire end-to-end ML orchestration pipeline can be built with minimal effort using existing open-source frameworks. The conversation will also cover what factors teams need to consider while building their MLops pipeline. Stacks include MLflow, Argoflow, Seldon-core, Grafana, and respective alternatives. submitted by /u/har2018vey [link] [comments]

(1 min) The review process at ICML 2022 is different this year: It seems that there are at least two phases. Papers with two negative recommendations in phase 1 are rejected. But, the Meta-reviewer can reverse this outcome. Reviewers do not make accept/reject recommendations in phase 2, the Meta-Reviewers will decide based on the reviews. Details here: https://icml.cc/Conferences/2022/ReviewForm submitted by /u/bremen79 [link] [comments]

(2 min) Hi! So I am working on a problem statement, the dataset is tabular and it contains mixed types of data types ( continuous and categorical variables ) For example, the data looks like this: ​ dataset sample I have few conditions, I am filtering the rows and making some combinations based on conditions, for example, I have filtered out these combinations : ​ Condition 1 : Gender == Male & smoking_status == smokes Condition 2 : Gender == Female & smoking_status == smokes Condition 3 : Gender == Male & age == 81 Condition 4 : Gender == Male & heart_issue == 1 Condition 5 : Gender == Female & heart_issue == 0 ​ Now whatever rows will be filtered by condition 1, I want to summarize those rows as single rows and the same goes for condition 2 and so on. For example, from the above da…

(3 min) Hi r/MachineLearning! AI in Government is hosting Kevin Mills, Head Global Government Partnerships at Coursera next Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 12 PM ET. I wanted to share this with you in case any of you were interested in joining since I'm excited to hear what Kevin thinks are the most important skills for AI & ML. Below is the information from the website and the link: ----------- Feature Presenter: Kevin Mills, Head Global Government Partnerships, Coursera As organizations in both the public and private sectors are grappling with the digital skills gap within their workforces, employee development has become an important differentiator in nurturing the AI and Data skills that governments need. By offering training, certification, and other upskilling programs, governments can reap the benefits of a more productive workforce with the skills necessary to leverage the promise of AI and data analysis. Join this webinar to learn: Recent trends and drivers for employee AI and data skills development across more than just data science teams Use cases and best practices for organizations making AI skills development a reality The benefits of partnering to expedite your training and skills achievement at government scale Agenda: 12:00pm-12:30: Featured Presentation 12:30-13:00pm: Your Q&A and interaction --------- Link: https://events.cognilytica.com/CLNjI1M3wxOA submitted by /u/DataGeek0 [link] [comments]

(1 min) I am a Machine Learning Engineer (familiar with Visual AI) who wants to get quickly into this topic. Recommended survey papers are also very much welcome. submitted by /u/CodingButStillAlive [link] [comments]

(2 min) I understand that a contrastive learning approach such as SimCLR has an inherent problem when dealing with a low number of classes (let's say 2,3,5,6, maybe even 10). Problem is that the chances of picking a negative sample that has the same label as the image from the positive pair is not low (let's say a dog and another dog) Which contrastive learning approaches do better on such problems that we have let's say 4 classes rather than 1000 (or 100)? Are there are good unsupervised/self-supervised approaches to tackle such problems when we want to get a good representation of unlabeled data? submitted by /u/Cute-Ad77 [link] [comments]

(7 min) I have often heard that Deep Learning Models (i.e. Deep Neural Networks) are automatically performing feature engineering within the network themselves. This is contrasted with traditional statistical and Machine Learning models where the feature engineering is typically done prior to training the model: ​ ​ https://preview.redd.it/a8pvvie3kye81.png?width=1240&format=png&auto=webp&s=1ef560cde5082ad01f77d380b01f3574c6533154 Apparently, the operations that Neural Networks perform during the training phase are equivalent to "searching for meaningful combinations of variables that produce better performance results on the training data". I have heard that this is in some way similar to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Kernel Methods, seeing as these methods combine many different existing features into new features that have "more meaningful representation". I read (https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/why-do-neural-networks-need-feature-selection-engineering) about this ability of Deep Neural Networks to "automatically perform feature engineering" : Deep learning solves this central problem in representation learning by introducing representations that are expressed in terms of other, simpler representations. Deep learning enables the computer to build complex concepts out of simpler concepts. However, in the end - I still do not understand how Neural Networks during the training phase (i.e. gradient descent, weight update, backpropagation) are "automatically performing (some degree of) feature engineering". ​ How exactly are Neural Networks doing this? Thanks! submitted by /u/blueest [link] [comments]

(2 min) Traditional Survival Analysis, which traces its origins to medical studies, estimates the time-to-event after diagnosis while assuming all individuals undergo the event. However, in practice, some individuals are cured and therefore never experience the event. Allowing the possibility that some individuals may be cured while estimating the time-to-event, is called Cure Rate Survival Analysis. Fortunately, Cure Rate Survival Analysis also finds many uses in business: Not every user clicks on an ad, nor does every machine fail, nor does every customer churn (at least in the short term), so your model shouldn't assume this! As a value add, incorporating a probability of cure with a time-to-event model, we better understand consumer/machine lifetimes which leads to reduced costs and higher retention. While the Python ecosystem has many excellent packages for traditional Survival Analysis, apd-crs is (at least to our knowledge), the first open-source Python package for Cure Rate Survival Analysis! It uses techniques from Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data to estimate cure labels. apd-crs is: Easy to download Comes with complete hands on tutorials and docs Based on original research submitted by /u/anon_0123 [link] [comments]

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(1 min) Hi all, I would like to use Reinforcement learning for a problem with 10 continuous state spaces and 3 discrete action spaces. My question now is whether I can use Deep-Q-Learning when having a multi-dimensional (3) action space and not only a one-dimensional action space? On the website of stable baselines it is listed that DQN can't be used for multiple discrete actions. So I am wondering whether this is just their specific implementation of a DQN or if it is generally not possible to do this? submitted by /u/PBerit [link] [comments]

(2 min) At university I'll have an undergraduate seminar about RL. We have to present a specific algorithm. We can choose one algorithm from a list. I want to choose a topic which poses the greatest challenge, is interesting and used in practice. We may also suggest a different RL algorithm. We can choose from the following. Monte Carlo Tree Search Q-Learning and the Bellman Equation SARSA REINFORCE Deep Q Networks Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Asynchronous Actor-Critic Trust Region Policy Optimization Proximal Policy Optimization Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Temporal Difference Learning Temporal Difference Learning with Eligibility Traces Continuous Deep Q-Learning with Model-based Acceleration Scalable Trust-Region Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning Non-Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits with EXP3 Linear Upper Confidence Bounds Follow-the-Perturbated-Leader Upper Confidence Bound with Adaptive Linear Programming Collaborative Filtering Bandits Weighted Least Squares Thompson Sampling How can I evaluate the algorithms based on the criteria mentioned above? Which one should I choose and why? We have to create a priority list so I'll have to select multiple ones. submitted by /u/HansSchmied [link] [comments]

(1 min) Is there any other model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm out there, besides the AlphaGo Zero series of algorithms? submitted by /u/andrewspano [link] [comments]

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(1 min) What is the best practice for combining the output of the convolutional encoder and some additional inputs? I have an image from the robot's camera and some telemetry like velocity, acceleration, etc., and I'm not sure how to combine these inputs. Currently, I pass images through 3 Conv layers, then concatenate the output with telemetry input and pass further to FC layers. Is it the right way to do it? What worries me, is that images pass through a deeper network than telemetry. submitted by /u/CharlottHebb [link] [comments]

(2 min) Consider the second order linear differential equation You could think of y as giving the height of a mass attached to a spring at time t where k is the stiffness of the spring. The solutions are sines and cosines with frequency √k. Think about how the solution depends on the spring constant k. If […] Slowing oscillations first appeared on John D. Cook.

(1 min) That are the best AIs that I found, are there better ones? https://youtu.be/GZVsONq3qtg ​ https://youtu.be/Peccbcj8Ibs submitted by /u/xXNOdrugsForMEXx [link] [comments]

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(1 min) Computer vision research encompasses a wide range of visual modalities, including images, videos, and depth perception. In general, the computer vision model treats each of these modalities separately to extract the most useful characteristics from their differences. While these modality-specific models outperform people on their specialized tasks, they lack the flexibility of a human-like visual system—the capacity to work across modalities. Instead of having an over-optimized model for each modality, the first step toward a true all-purpose vision system is to design models that work fluidly across modalities. In addition to their flexibility, such modality-agnostic models have various advantages over their traditional, modality-specific equivalents, such as: Continue Reading Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08377 Github: https://github.com/facebookresearch/omnivore Website: https://facebookresearch.github.io/omnivore/ https://preview.redd.it/zv07z9n1mve81.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=90dd50024e2ba23b3ee1de315acf09ad0906a1cc submitted by /u/ai-lover [link] [comments]

(1 min) Hello guys, could you raccomend a program that i can use to increase my video footage from 25 fps to 30 fps? I shoot people in various activities, so i need a really high realism in this ai program Ty a lot for your help! submitted by /u/AssociationTerrible5 [link] [comments]

(2 min) Hi all, I am wondering if any one would have a insight or know a open source Repo on a predictive death AI. I am trying to make a “highly accurate” (50%>) death predicting AI that takes the following things into consideration: - Age - Family history (Average passing, Diseases) - habits (smoking, vaping, drugs IE) And Probably one hundred more factors. Anyone have a idea on something that work or suggestions where to start? Thanks submitted by /u/Alext2v2 [link] [comments]

(1 min) View Poll submitted by /u/futureanalytica [link] [comments]

(0 min) Any online AI course that is based on the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach? submitted by /u/cocag13996 [link] [comments]

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(1 min) This is a place to share machine learning research papers, journals, and articles that you're reading this week. If it relates to what you're researching, by all means elaborate and give us your insight, otherwise it could just be an interesting paper you've read. Please try to provide some insight from your understanding and please don't post things which are present in wiki. Preferably you should link the arxiv page (not the PDF, you can easily access the PDF from the summary page but not the other way around) or any other pertinent links. Previous weeks : 1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71-80 81-90 91-100 101-110 111-120 121-130 Week 1 Week 11 Week 21 Week 31 Week 41 Week 51 Week 61 Week 71 Week 81 Week 91 Week 101 Week 111 Week 121 Week 2 Week 12 Week 22 Week 32…

(1 min) I've been with Google for just over 2 years now, and I've seen that Google seems to consider Data Engineers equally skilled as software engineers. Algorithms and data structures, systems design, memory management, designing distributed systems, etc. Other companies like Meta/Amazon seem to believe that data engineering involves using no-code/low-code tools to build data pipelines. Do you think Data Engineering is going to align closer to software engineering, or closer to specialized BIEs? Will Analytics Engineer become more popular? My experience at Google is such that it's actually more difficult to find roles at other companies, and I thought Google would be a great resume builder. I share my experiences here submitted by /u/Flat_Shower [link] [comments]

(1 min) Has anyone here deployed any products that use Gaussian Processes or Bayesian Linear Regression? Im studying up on it (am super fascinated by it) but have heard that the run time at inference can be very long and so can finding the best Kernel Parameters (which is I guess analogous to training). submitted by /u/MGeeeeeezy [link] [comments]

(1 min) For a project I am doing I am using amino optimizer to get to best results. One of the constraints for this model is that an hourly demand always needs the be met. However, as the solution of this solver has an heavy overfit, I was wondering what type of ml can be used to do the same thing. To dive deeper into the problem, let’s say over a day. For the first three hours I must deliver 3 packages. After that I need four. The store prices of store a increases over the day and of store b increases. The models job is to decide how much to buy at every hour, knowing only the past price and the price of the coming hour. It can also decide to store a certain amount of packages. Keep in mind demand has te be met every hour. Curious about your thoughts submitted by /u/Any-Description3824 [link] [comments]

(1 min) Please post your questions here instead of creating a new thread. Encourage others who create new posts for questions to post here instead! Thread will stay alive until next one so keep posting after the date in the title. Thanks to everyone for answering questions in the previous thread! submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

(1 min) ICLR 2022 statistics info. ​ https://preview.redd.it/engpgy72kue81.png?width=1454&format=png&auto=webp&s=17f768f1e3998cd824457869e4f7218078c6797a submitted by /u/weiguoqiang [link] [comments]

(1 min) https://colabnotebooks.com/ This is not mine - just found it randomly. notebooks include useful ones like VQGAN+CLIP, making Nerfies etc. Might be useful for people wanting to quickly search for some famous usecase and prototype quickly :) submitted by /u/Competitive-Rub-1958 [link] [comments]

(1 min) Abstract: "One could be excused for assuming that deep learning had or will soon usurp all credible work in reasoning, artificial intelligence, and statistics, but like most “meme” class broad generalizations the concept does not hold up to scrutiny. Memes do not generally matter since the experts will always know better; but in the case of Bayesian software like Stan and PyMC3, even their developers and advocates bemoan the apparent dominance of deep learning as manifested in popular culture, breathtaking performance, and most problematically from funding agency peer review that impacts our ability to further advance the field. The facts, however, do not support the assumed dominance of deep learning in science upon closer examination. This letter simply makes the argument by the crudest of possible metrics, citation count, that once the discipline of Computer Science is subtracted, Bayesian software accounts for nearly a third of research citations. Stan and PyMC3 dominate some fields, PyTorch, Keras, and TensorFlow dominate others with lot of variations in between. Bayesian and deep-learning approaches are related but very different technologies in goals, implementation, and applicability with little actual overlap--so this is not a surprise. For example, deep learning cannot bring the explainability of applied math/statistics and Bayesian methods do not scale to deep-learning data sets. While deep-learning behemoths like Facebook and Google use and support Bayesian efforts, the Bayesian packages scientists actually use are academic/volunteer efforts punching far above their weight class, and they need financial support. It would behoove funders to fully understand the impact and role of Bayesian methods in resource allocation." Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ail2.62 submitted by /u/bikeskata [link] [comments]

(1 min) I've trained a variational autoencoder and now want to pass the autoencoded representation of the input to a different model. Should i train the autoencoder sequentially with this model? Or is it better to train the other model seperately and pass the autoencoded input at inference time. submitted by /u/shikh5753 [link] [comments]

(5 min) Hi! So I have been a data scientist for over three years and for several reasons I would like to switch to more SWE oriented roles. In particular, I aim at Machine Learning Engineer positions at tech companies. I have a MSc in CS but I have never had thorough coding interviews. At my job I build ML models, write SQL, and built some Airflow DAGs. I don't have direct experience with Kubernetes or model serving a scale. Ideally, I want to work on production challenges and not anymore on R&D. Could you help me identify what should I focus on to prepare for interviews? I'm planning to change job this summer, and so far my plan was: Go over the "cracking the coding interview" book Read "designing data intensive application" book Go over "system design interview" book Practice on leetcode What do you think? Anything specific to ML engineer roles I should add or remove from this list? submitted by /u/jesxdxd [link] [comments]

(1 min) I'm working on a model agnostic approach for monitoring and dealing with concept drift in regression for a research project. Aside from working with synthethic data there is a company we're validating our results on. While poking around I found that the model they're currently using in production, linear regression, could be swapped out for a gradient boosted tree, this would significantly improve performance. Yes, tree-based models have issues with trend because they can't extrapolate but there are ways to get around that. My only issue in doing so is that tracking beta hat seems to be a key part of their current monitoring set-up. I kind of like this, checking coefficients are a good sanity check but how important are they really? Most of the OLS assumptions are broken, the only thing they can tell you at this point is coeff A > coeff B in this instance of the model. In that case isn't it fair to just swap out the regression for gradient boosting + LIME/SHAP? How do you guys approach such things. submitted by /u/the75th [link] [comments]

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(0 min) Hello, everyone) Just want make post about my old project. I work on it sometimes... This lib provides envs and agents for experiments building. Now you can train agents in your browser and Node.js ​ https://i.redd.it/ipjzv2yegse81.gif https://github.com/polyzer/rllib.js submitted by /u/tokarev_iv [link] [comments]

(1 min) submitted by /u/Syntaximus [link] [comments]

(1 min) submitted by /u/amin_mlm [link] [comments]

(1 min) In the hyperparameters, when they say: learning rate - 0.00025 - The learning rate used by RMSProp gradient momentum - 0.95 - Gradient momentum used by RMSProp squared gradient momentum - 0.95 - Squared gradient (denominator) momentum used by RMSProp min squared gradient - 0.01 - Constant added to the squared gradient in the denominator of the RMSProp update Is it this in tensorflow 2? tf.optimizers.RMSprop(learning_rate=0.00025, rho=0.95, momentum=0.95, epsilon=0.01) I'm trying to set it as close as they did, but I'm getting confused by the names of the arguments in RMSProp. Also, how would this translate to using Adam? submitted by /u/pedrohpf [link] [comments]

(2 min) I'm a beginner doing the University of Alberta Specialization in RL which is based on Barto-Sutton book. The specialization is great, but reading about the actual libraries for RL (for example stable-baselines) I noticed that most of the algorithms implemented in the library are not in the book. Are this moderns algorithms using Deep RL instead? In this case, is the RL moving to Deep RL? Sorry if those are dumb questions, I want to have a better knowledge on what are the algorithms used today in real life and what can I expect when I start doing my own projects. submitted by /u/Pipiyedu [link] [comments]

(1 min) I have tuned the RL's hyperparameters for training a use case with 100 episodes. I wonder if I can use the same hyperparameters for another training with 200 episodes? Do episode's number have a high impact on hyperparameters' value? submitted by /u/mehmor [link] [comments]

(1 min) As the question states, I am currently creating a custom gym environment and was not sure how to compute the reward in the step function. Does the reward have to be the complete sum of rewards from start up to the current step? Or should I only be returning the reward for that step? I am a novice, so …. ELI5 submitted by /u/MasalaByte [link] [comments]

(2 min) Churn prediction in credit cards, fraud detection in insurance, and loan default prediction are important analytical customer relationship management (ACRM) problems. Since frauds, churns and defaults happen less frequently, the datasets for these problems turn out to be naturally highly unbalanced. Consequently, all supervised machine learning classifiers tend to yield substantial false-positive rates when trained on such unbalanced datasets. We propose two ways of data balancing. In the first, we propose an oversampling method to generate synthetic samples of minority class using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We employ Vanilla GAN [1], Wasserstein GAN [2] and CTGAN [3] separately to oversample the minority class samples. In order to assess the efficacy of our proposed approach, we use a host of machine learning classifiers, including Random Forest, Decision Tree, support vector machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression on the data balanced by GANs. In the second method, we introduce a hybrid method to handle data imbalance. In this second way, we utilize the power of undersampling and over-sampling together by augmenting the synthetic minority class data oversampled by GAN with the undersampled majority class data obtained by one-class support vigor machine (OCSVM) [4]. We combine both over-sampled data generated by GAN and the data under-sampled by OCSVM [4] and pass the resultant data to classifiers. When we compared our results to those of Farquad et al. [5], Sundarkumar, Ravi, and Siddeshwar [6], our proposed methods outperform the previous results in terms of the area under the ROC curve (AUC) on all datasets.

(2 min) Functional constrained optimization is becoming more and more important in machine learning and operations research. Such problems have potential applications in risk-averse machine learning, semisupervised learning, and robust optimization among others. In this paper, we first present a novel Constraint Extrapolation (ConEx) method for solving convex functional constrained problems, which utilizes linear approximations of the constraint functions to define the extrapolation (or acceleration) step. We show that this method is a unified algorithm that achieves the best-known rate of convergence for solving different functional constrained convex composite problems, including convex or strongly convex, and smooth or nonsmooth problems with a stochastic objective and/or stochastic constraints. Many of these rates of convergence were in fact obtained for the first time in the literature. In addition, ConEx is a single-loop algorithm that does not involve any penalty subproblems. Contrary to existing primal-dual methods, it does not require the projection of Lagrangian multipliers into a (possibly unknown) bounded set. Second, for nonconvex functional constrained problems, we introduce a new proximal point method that transforms the initial nonconvex problem into a sequence of convex problems by adding quadratic terms to both the objective and constraints. Under a certain MFCQ-type assumption, we establish the convergence and rate of convergence of this method to KKT points when the convex subproblems are solved exactly or inexactly. For large-scale and stochastic problems, we present a more practical proximal point method in which the approximate solutions of the subproblems are computed by the aforementioned ConEx method. To the best of our knowledge, most of these convergence and complexity results of the proximal point method for nonconvex problems also seem to be new in the literature.

(2 min) One of the most important and challenging problems in football is predicting future player performance when transferred to another club within and between different leagues. In addition to being the most valuable prediction a team makes, it is also the most complex analytics task to perform as it needs to take into consideration: a) differences in playing style between the player's current team and target team, b) differences in style and ability of other players on each team, c) differences in league quality and style, and d) the role the player is desired to play. In this paper, we present a method which addresses these issues and enables us to make accurate predictions of future performance. Our Transfer Portal model utilizes a personalized neural network accounting for both stylistic and ability level input representations for players, teams, and leagues to simulate future player performance at any chosen club. Furthermore, we use a Bayesian updating framework to dynamically modify player and team representations over time which enables us to generate predictions for rising stars with small amounts of data.

(2 min) Generative models for graphs have been actively studied for decades, and they have a wide range of applications. Recently, learning-based graph generation that reproduces real-world graphs has gradually attracted the attention of many researchers. Several generative models that utilize modern machine learning technologies have been proposed, though a conditional generation of general graphs is less explored in the field. In this paper, we propose a generative model that allows us to tune a value of a global-level structural feature as a condition. Our model called GraphTune enables to tune a value of any structural feature of generated graphs using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (CVAE). We performed comparative evaluations of GraphTune and conventional models with a real graph dataset. The evaluations show that GraphTune enables to clearly tune a value of a global-level structural feature compared to the conventional models.

(2 min) This work investigates the use of neural networks admitting high-order derivatives for modeling dynamic variations of smooth implicit surfaces. For this purpose, it extends the representation of differentiable neural implicit surfaces to higher dimensions, which opens up mechanisms that allow to exploit geometric transformations in many settings, from animation and surface evolution to shape morphing and design galleries. The problem is modeled by a $k$-parameter family of surfaces $S_c$, specified as a neural network function $f : \mathbb{R}^3 \times \mathbb{R}^k \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, where $S_c$ is the zero-level set of the implicit function $f(\cdot, c) : \mathbb{R}^3 \rightarrow \mathbb{R} $, with $c \in \mathbb{R}^k$, with variations induced by the control variable $c$. In that context, restricted to each coordinate of $\mathbb{R}^k$, the underlying representation is a neural homotopy which is the solution of a general partial differential equation.

(2 min) Exploration is crucial for training the optimal reinforcement learning (RL) policy, where the key is to discriminate whether a state visiting is novel. Most previous work focuses on designing heuristic rules or distance metrics to check whether a state is novel without considering such a discrimination process that can be learned. In this paper, we propose a novel method called generative adversarial exploration (GAEX) to encourage exploration in RL via introducing an intrinsic reward output from a generative adversarial network, where the generator provides fake samples of states that help discriminator identify those less frequently visited states. Thus the agent is encouraged to visit those states which the discriminator is less confident to judge as visited. GAEX is easy to implement and of high training efficiency. In our experiments, we apply GAEX into DQN and the DQN-GAEX algorithm achieves convincing performance on challenging exploration problems, including the game Venture, Montezuma's Revenge and Super Mario Bros, without further fine-tuning on complicate learning algorithms. To our knowledge, this is the first work to employ GAN in RL exploration problems.

(2 min) The main question is: why and how can we ever predict based on a finite sample? The question is not answered by statistical learning theory. Here, I suggest that prediction requires belief in "predictability" of the underlying dependence, and learning involves search for a hypothesis where these beliefs are violated the least given the observations. The measure of these violations ("errors") for given data, hypothesis and particular type of predictability beliefs is formalized as concept of incongruity in modal Logic of Observations and Hypotheses (LOH). I show on examples of many popular textbook learners (from hierarchical clustering to k-NN and SVM) that each of them minimizes its own version of incongruity. In addition, the concept of incongruity is shown to be flexible enough for formalization of some important data analysis problems, not considered as part of ML.

(2 min) The Internet has become a prime subject to security attacks and intrusions by attackers. These attacks can lead to system malfunction, network breakdown, data corruption or theft. A network intrusion detection system (IDS) is a tool used for identifying unauthorized and malicious behavior by observing the network traffic. State-of-the-art intrusion detection systems are designed to detect an attack by inspecting the complete information about the attack. This means that an IDS would only be able to detect an attack after it has been executed on the system under attack and might have caused damage to the system. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end early intrusion detection system to prevent network attacks before they could cause any more damage to the system under attack while preventing unforeseen downtime and interruption. We employ a deep neural network-based classifier for attack identification. The network is trained in a supervised manner to extract relevant features from raw network traffic data instead of relying on a manual feature selection process used in most related approaches. Further, we introduce a new metric, called earliness, to evaluate how early our proposed approach detects attacks. We have empirically evaluated our approach on the CICIDS2017 dataset. The results show that our approach performed well and attained an overall 0.803 balanced accuracy.

(2 min) Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown encouraging results in automating the architecture design. Recently, DARTS relaxes the search process with a differentiable formulation that leverages weight-sharing and SGD where all candidate operations are trained simultaneously. Our empirical results show that such procedure results in the co-adaption problem and Matthew Effect: operations with fewer parameters would be trained maturely earlier. This causes two problems: firstly, the operations with more parameters may never have the chance to express the desired function since those with less have already done the job; secondly, the system will punish those underperforming operations by lowering their architecture parameter, and they will get smaller loss gradients, which causes the Matthew Effect. In this paper, we systematically study these problems and propose a novel grouped operation dropout algorithm named DropNAS to fix the problems with DARTS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DropNAS solves the above issues and achieves promising performance. Specifically, DropNAS achieves 2.26% test error on CIFAR-10, 16.39% on CIFAR-100 and 23.4% on ImageNet (with the same training hyperparameters as DARTS for a fair comparison). It is also observed that DropNAS is robust across variants of the DARTS search space. Code is available at https://github.com/wiljohnhong/DropNAS.

(2 min) [Context and motivation] For automated driving systems, the operational context needs to be known in order to state guarantees on performance and safety. The operational design domain (ODD) is an abstraction of the operational context, and its definition is an integral part of the system development process. [Question / problem] There are still major uncertainties in how to clearly define and document the operational context in a diverse and distributed development environment such as the automotive industry. This case study investigates the challenges with context definitions for the development of perception functions that use machine learning for automated driving. [Principal ideas/results] Based on qualitative analysis of data from semi-structured interviews, the case study shows that there is a lack of standardisation for context definitions across the industry, ambiguities in the processes that lead to deriving the ODD, missing documentation of assumptions about the operational context, and a lack of involvement of function developers in the context definition. [Contribution] The results outline challenges experienced by an automotive supplier company when defining the operational context for systems using machine learning. Furthermore, the study collected ideas for potential solutions from the perspective of practitioners.

(2 min) This paper studies the accelerated gradient descent for general nonconvex problems under the gradient Lipschitz and Hessian Lipschitz assumptions. We establish that a simple restarted accelerated gradient descent (AGD) finds an $\epsilon$-approximate first-order stationary point in $O(\epsilon^{-7/4})$ gradient computations with simple proofs. Our complexity does not hide any polylogarithmic factors, and thus it improves over the state-of-the-art one by the $O(\log\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ factor. Our simple algorithm only consists of Nesterov's classical AGD and a restart mechanism, and it does not need the negative curvature exploitation or the optimization of regularized surrogate functions. Technically, our simple proof does not invoke the analysis for the strongly convex AGD, which is crucial to remove the $O(\log\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ factor.

(2 min) In the age of streaming and surveillance compressed video enhancement has become a problem in need of constant improvement. Here, we investigate a way of improving the Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement approach. This approach consists of making use of the frames that have the peak quality in the region to improve those that have a lower quality in that region. This approach consists of obtaining quantized data from the videos using a deep belief network. The quantized data is then fed into the MF-CNN architecture to improve the compressed video. We further investigate the impact of using a Bi-LSTM for detecting the peak quality frames. Our approach obtains better results than the first approach of the MFQE which uses an SVM for PQF detection. On the other hand, our MFQE approach does not outperform the latest version of the MQFE approach that uses a Bi-LSTM for PQF detection.

(2 min) Deep learning-based methods in computational microscopy have been shown to be powerful but in general face some challenges due to limited generalization to new types of samples and requirements for large and diverse training data. Here, we demonstrate a few-shot transfer learning method that helps a holographic image reconstruction deep neural network rapidly generalize to new types of samples using small datasets. We pre-trained a convolutional recurrent neural network on a large dataset with diverse types of samples, which serves as the backbone model. By fixing the recurrent blocks and transferring the rest of the convolutional blocks of the pre-trained model, we reduced the number of trainable parameters by ~90% compared with standard transfer learning, while achieving equivalent generalization. We validated the effectiveness of this approach by successfully generalizing to new types of samples using small holographic datasets for training, and achieved (i) ~2.5-fold convergence speed acceleration, (ii) ~20% computation time reduction per epoch, and (iii) improved reconstruction performance over baseline network models trained from scratch. This few-shot transfer learning approach can potentially be applied in other microscopic imaging methods, helping to generalize to new types of samples without the need for extensive training time and data.

(2 min) This paper presents LAGOON -- an open source platform for understanding the complex ecosystems of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. The platform currently utilizes spatiotemporal graphs to store and investigate the artifacts produced by these communities, and help analysts identify bad actors who might compromise an OSS project's security. LAGOON provides ingest of artifacts from several common sources, including source code repositories, issue trackers, mailing lists and scraping content from project websites. Ingestion utilizes a modular architecture, which supports incremental updates from data sources and provides a generic identity fusion process that can recognize the same community members across disparate accounts. A user interface is provided for visualization and exploration of an OSS project's complete sociotechnical graph. Scripts are provided for applying machine learning to identify patterns within the data. While current focus is on the identification of bad actors in the Python community, the platform's reusability makes it easily extensible with new data and analyses, paving the way for LAGOON to become a comprehensive means of assessing various OSS-based projects and their communities.

(2 min) We extend the neural basis expansion analysis (NBEATS) to incorporate exogenous factors. The resulting method, called NBEATSx, improves on a well performing deep learning model, extending its capabilities by including exogenous variables and allowing it to integrate multiple sources of useful information. To showcase the utility of the NBEATSx model, we conduct a comprehensive study of its application to electricity price forecasting (EPF) tasks across a broad range of years and markets. We observe state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving the forecast accuracy by nearly 20% over the original NBEATS model, and by up to 5% over other well established statistical and machine learning methods specialized for these tasks. Additionally, the proposed neural network has an interpretable configuration that can structurally decompose time series, visualizing the relative impact of trend and seasonal components and revealing the modeled processes' interactions with exogenous factors. To assist related work we made the code available in https://github.com/cchallu/nbeatsx.

(2 min) Image colorization is the process of estimating RGB colors for grayscale images or video frames to improve their aesthetic and perceptual quality. Deep learning techniques for image colorization have progressed notably over the last decade, calling the need for a systematic survey and benchmarking of these techniques. This article presents a comprehensive survey of recent state-of-the-art deep learning-based image colorization techniques, describing their fundamental block architectures, inputs, optimizers, loss functions, training protocols, and training data \textit{etc.} It categorizes the existing colorization techniques into seven classes and discusses important factors governing their performance, such as benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics. We highlight the limitations of existing datasets and introduce a new dataset specific to colorization. Using the existing datasets and our new one, we perform an extensive experimental evaluation of existing image colorization methods. Finally, we discuss the limitations of existing methods and recommend possible solutions as well as future research directions for this rapidly evolving topic of deep image colorization. Dataset and codes for evaluation are publicly available at https://github.com/saeed-anwar/ColorSurvey

(2 min) The growing interest in creating a parametric representation of liquid sloshing inside a container stems from its practical applications in modern engineering systems. The resonant excitation, on the other hand, can cause unstable and nonlinear water waves, resulting in chaotic motions and non-Gaussian signals. This paper presents a novel machine learning-based framework for nonlinear liquid sloshing representation learning. The proposed method is a parametric modeling technique that is based on sequential learning and sparse regularization. The dynamics are categorized into two parts: linear evolution and nonlinear forcing. The former advances the dynamical system in time on an embedded manifold, while the latter causes divergent behaviors in temporal evolution, such as bursting and switching. The proposed framework's merit is demonstrated using an experimental dataset of liquid sloshing in a tank under horizontal excitation with a wide frequency range and various vertical slat screen settings.

(2 min) In this work, we analyze the eigenvalue spectra and stability of discrete-time dynamical systems parametrized by deep neural networks. In particular, we leverage a representation of deep neural networks as pointwise affine maps, thus exposing their local linear operators and making them accessible to classical system analytic methods.The view of neural networks as affine parameter varying maps allows us to "crack open the black box" of neural network dynamical behavior by visualizing stationary points, state-space partitioning, and eigenvalue spectra. We provide sufficient conditions for the fixed-point stability of discrete-time deep neural dynamical systems. Empirically, we analyze the variance in dynamical behavior and eigenvalue spectra of local linear operators of neural dynamics with varying weight factorizations, activation functions, bias terms, and depths.

(2 min) Using large pre-trained models for image recognition tasks is becoming increasingly common owing to the well acknowledged success of recent models like vision transformers and other CNN-based models like VGG and Resnet. The high accuracy of these models on benchmark tasks has translated into their practical use across many domains including safety-critical applications like autonomous driving and medical diagnostics. Despite their widespread use, image models have been shown to be fragile to changes in the operating environment, bringing their robustness into question. There is an urgent need for methods that systematically characterise and quantify the capabilities of these models to help designers understand and provide guarantees about their safety and robustness. In this paper, we propose Vision Checklist, a framework aimed at interrogating the capabilities of a model in order to produce a report that can be used by a system designer for robustness evaluations. This framework proposes a set of perturbation operations that can be applied on the underlying data to generate test samples of different types. The perturbations reflect potential changes in operating environments, and interrogate various properties ranging from the strictly quantitative to more qualitative. Our framework is evaluated on multiple datasets like Tinyimagenet, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Camelyon17 and for models like ViT and Resnet. Our Vision Checklist proposes a specific set of evaluations that can be integrated into the previously proposed concept of a model card. Robustness evaluations like our checklist will be crucial in future safety evaluations of visual perception modules, and be useful for a wide range of stakeholders including designers, deployers, and regulators involved in the certification of these systems. Source code of Vision Checklist would be open for public use.

(2 min) Emotions at work have long been identified as critical signals of work motivations, status, and attitudes, and as predictors of various work-related outcomes. When more and more employees work remotely, these emotional signals of workers become harder to observe through daily, face-to-face communications. The use of online platforms to communicate and collaborate at work provides an alternative channel to monitor the emotions of workers. This paper studies how emojis, as non-verbal cues in online communications, can be used for such purposes and how the emotional signals in emoji usage can be used to predict future behavior of workers. In particular, we present how the developers on GitHub use emojis in their work-related activities. We show that developers have diverse patterns of emoji usage, which can be related to their working status including activity levels, types of work, types of communications, time management, and other behavioral patterns. Developers who use emojis in their posts are significantly less likely to dropout from the online work platform. Surprisingly, solely using emoji usage as features, standard machine learning models can predict future dropouts of developers at a satisfactory accuracy. Features related to the general use and the emotions of emojis appear to be important factors, while they do not rule out paths through other purposes of emoji use.

(2 min) Deep neural networks are notorious for defying theoretical treatment. However, when the number of parameters in each layer tends to infinity the network function is a Gaussian process (GP) and quantitatively predictive description is possible. Gaussian approximation allows to formulate criteria for selecting hyperparameters, such as variances of weights and biases, as well as the learning rate. These criteria rely on the notion of criticality defined for deep neural networks. In this work we describe a new practical way to diagnose criticality. We introduce \emph{partial Jacobians} of a network, defined as derivatives of preactivations in layer $l$ with respect to preactivations in layer $l_0\leq l$. We derive recurrence relations for the norms of partial Jacobians and utilize these relations to analyze criticality of deep fully connected neural networks with LayerNorm and/or residual connections. We derive and implement a simple and cheap numerical test that allows to select optimal initialization for a broad class of deep neural networks. Using these tools we show quantitatively that proper stacking of the LayerNorm (applied to preactivations) and residual connections leads to an architecture that is critical for any initialization. Finally, we apply our methods to analyze the MLP-Mixer architecture and show that it is everywhere critical.

(2 min) Obtaining first-order regret bounds -- regret bounds scaling not as the worst-case but with some measure of the performance of the optimal policy on a given instance -- is a core question in sequential decision-making. While such bounds exist in many settings, they have proven elusive in reinforcement learning with large state spaces. In this work we address this gap, and show that it is possible to obtain regret scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{V_1^\star K})$ in reinforcement learning with large state spaces, namely the linear MDP setting. Here $V_1^\star$ is the value of the optimal policy and $K$ is the number of episodes. We demonstrate that existing techniques based on least squares estimation are insufficient to obtain this result, and instead develop a novel robust self-normalized concentration bound based on the robust Catoni mean estimator, which may be of independent interest.

(2 min) We analyze stochastic conditional gradient methods for constrained optimization problems arising in over-parametrized machine learning. We show that one could leverage the interpolation-like conditions satisfied by such models to obtain improved oracle complexities. Specifically, when the objective function is convex, we show that the conditional gradient method requires $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ calls to the stochastic gradient oracle to find an $\epsilon$-optimal solution. Furthermore, by including a gradient sliding step, we show that the number of calls reduces to $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-1.5})$.

(2 min) The model order of a wireless channel plays an important role for a variety of applications in communications engineering, e.g., it represents the number of resolvable incident wavefronts with non-negligible power incident from a transmitter to a receiver. Areas such as direction of arrival estimation leverage the model order to analyze the multipath components of channel state information. In this work, we propose to use a variational autoencoder to group unlabeled channel state information with respect to the model order in the variational autoencoder latent space in an unsupervised manner. We validate our approach with simulated 3GPP channel data. Our results suggest that, in order to learn an appropriate clustering, it is crucial to use a more flexible likelihood model for the variational autoencoder decoder than it is usually the case in standard applications.

(2 min) Initially developed for natural language processing (NLP), Transformer model is now widely used for speech processing tasks such as speaker recognition, due to its powerful sequence modeling capabilities. However, conventional self-attention mechanisms are originally designed for modeling textual sequence without considering the characteristics of speech and speaker modeling. Besides, different Transformer variants for speaker recognition have not been well studied. In this work, we propose a novel multi-view self-attention mechanism and present an empirical study of different Transformer variants with or without the proposed attention mechanism for speaker recognition. Specifically, to balance the capabilities of capturing global dependencies and modeling the locality, we propose a multi-view self-attention mechanism for speaker Transformer, in which different attention heads can attend to different ranges of the receptive field. Furthermore, we introduce and compare five Transformer variants with different network architectures, embedding locations, and pooling methods to learn speaker embeddings. Experimental results on the VoxCeleb1 and VoxCeleb2 datasets show that the proposed multi-view self-attention mechanism achieves improvement in the performance of speaker recognition, and the proposed speaker Transformer network attains excellent results compared with state-of-the-art models.

(2 min) This paper presents DRE-CUSUM, an unsupervised density-ratio estimation (DRE) based approach to determine statistical changes in time-series data when no knowledge of the pre-and post-change distributions are available. The core idea behind the proposed approach is to split the time-series at an arbitrary point and estimate the ratio of densities of distribution (using a parametric model such as a neural network) before and after the split point. The DRE-CUSUM change detection statistic is then derived from the cumulative sum (CUSUM) of the logarithm of the estimated density ratio. We present a theoretical justification as well as accuracy guarantees which show that the proposed statistic can reliably detect statistical changes, irrespective of the split point. While there have been prior works on using density ratio based methods for change detection, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first unsupervised change detection approach with a theoretical justification and accuracy guarantees. The simplicity of the proposed framework makes it readily applicable in various practical settings (including high-dimensional time-series data); we also discuss generalizations for online change detection. We experimentally show the superiority of DRE-CUSUM using both synthetic and real-world datasets over existing state-of-the-art unsupervised algorithms (such as Bayesian online change detection, its variants as well as several other heuristic methods).

(2 min) Direct-to-satellite (DtS) communication has gained importance recently to support globally connected Internet of things (IoT) networks. However, relatively long distances of densely deployed satellite networks around the Earth cause a high path loss. In addition, since high complexity operations such as beamforming, tracking and equalization have to be performed in IoT devices partially, both the hardware complexity and the need for high-capacity batteries of IoT devices increase. The reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have the potential to increase the energy-efficiency and to perform complex signal processing over the transmission environment instead of IoT devices. But, RISs need the information of the cascaded channel in order to change the phase of the incident signal. This study proposes graph attention networks (GATs) for the challenging channel estimation problem and examines the performance of DtS IoT networks for different RIS configurations under GAT channel estimation. It is shown that the proposed GAT both demonstrates a higher performance with increased robustness under changing conditions and has lower computational complexity compared to conventional deep learning methods. Moreover, bit error rate performance is investigated for RIS designs with discrete and non-uniform phase shifts under channel estimation based on the proposed method. One of the findings in this study is that the channel models of the operating environment and the performance of the channel estimation method must be considered during RIS design to exploit performance improvement as far as possible.

(2 min) We analyze several generic proximal splitting algorithms well suited for large-scale convex nonsmooth optimization. We derive sublinear and linear convergence results with new rates on the function value suboptimality or distance to the solution, as well as new accelerated versions, using varying stepsizes. In addition, we propose distributed variants of these algorithms, which can be accelerated as well. While most existing results are ergodic, our nonergodic results significantly broaden our understanding of primal-dual optimization algorithms.

(2 min) Foreign Object Debris (FOD) detection has attracted increased attention in the area of machine learning and computer vision. However, a robust and publicly available image dataset for FOD has not been initialized. To this end, this paper introduces an image dataset of FOD, named FOD in Airports (FOD-A). FOD-A object categories have been selected based on guidance from prior documentation and related research by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In addition to the primary annotations of bounding boxes for object detection, FOD-A provides labeled environmental conditions. As such, each annotation instance is further categorized into three light level categories (bright, dim, and dark) and two weather categories (dry and wet). Currently, FOD-A has released 31 object categories and over 30,000 annotation instances. This paper presents the creation methodology, discusses the publicly available dataset extension process, and demonstrates the practicality of FOD-A with widely used machine learning models for object detection.

(2 min) We introduce a flexible framework that produces high-quality almost-exact matches for causal inference. Most prior work in matching uses ad-hoc distance metrics, often leading to poor quality matches, particularly when there are irrelevant covariates. In this work, we learn an interpretable distance metric for matching, which leads to substantially higher quality matches. The learned distance metric stretches the covariate space according to each covariate's contribution to outcome prediction: this stretching means that mismatches on important covariates carry a larger penalty than mismatches on irrelevant covariates. Our ability to learn flexible distance metrics leads to matches that are interpretable and useful for the estimation of conditional average treatment effects.

(2 min) We present a novel cryptography architecture based on memristor crossbar array, binary hypervectors, and neural network. Utilizing the stochastic and unclonable nature of memristor crossbar and error tolerance of binary hypervectors and neural network, implementation of the algorithm on memristor crossbar simulation is made possible. We demonstrate that with an increasing dimension of the binary hypervectors, the non-idealities in the memristor circuit can be effectively controlled. At the fine level of controlled crossbar non-ideality, noise from memristor circuit can be used to encrypt data while being sufficiently interpretable by neural network for decryption. We applied our algorithm on image cryptography for proof of concept, and to text en/decryption with 100% decryption accuracy despite crossbar noises. Our work shows the potential and feasibility of using memristor crossbars as an unclonable stochastic encoder unit of cryptography on top of their existing functionality as a vector-matrix multiplication acceleration device.

(2 min) Monitoring machine learning models once they are deployed is challenging. It is even more challenging to decide when to retrain models in real-case scenarios when labeled data is beyond reach, and monitoring performance metrics becomes unfeasible. In this work, we use non-parametric bootstrapped uncertainty estimates and SHAP values to provide explainable uncertainty estimation as a technique that aims to monitor the deterioration of machine learning models in deployment environments, as well as determine the source of model deterioration when target labels are not available. Classical methods are purely aimed at detecting distribution shift, which can lead to false positives in the sense that the model has not deteriorated despite a shift in the data distribution. To estimate model uncertainty we construct prediction intervals using a novel bootstrap method, which improves upon the work of Kumar & Srivastava (2012). We show that both our model deterioration detection system as well as our uncertainty estimation method achieve better performance than the current state-of-the-art. Finally, we use explainable AI techniques to gain an understanding of the drivers of model deterioration. We release an open source Python package, doubt, which implements our proposed methods, as well as the code used to reproduce our experiments.

(2 min) Deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch provide a productive interface for expressing and training a deep neural network (DNN) model on a single device or using data parallelism. Still, they may not be flexible or efficient enough in training emerging large models on distributed devices, which require more sophisticated parallelism beyond data parallelism. Plugins or wrappers have been developed to strengthen these frameworks for model or pipeline parallelism, but they complicate the usage and implementation of distributed deep learning. Aiming at a simple, neat redesign of distributed deep learning frameworks for various parallelism paradigms, we present OneFlow, a novel distributed training framework based on an SBP (split, broadcast and partial-value) abstraction and the actor model. SBP enables much easier programming of data parallelism and model parallelism than existing frameworks, and the actor model provides a succinct runtime mechanism to manage the complex dependencies imposed by resource constraints, data movement and computation in distributed deep learning. We demonstrate the general applicability and efficiency of OneFlow for training various large DNN models with case studies and extensive experiments. The results show that OneFlow outperforms many well-known customized libraries built on top of the state-of-the-art frameworks. The code of OneFlow is available at: https://github.com/Oneflow-Inc/oneflow.

(2 min) Learning from data that contain missing values represents a common phenomenon in many domains. Relatively few Bayesian Network structure learning algorithms account for missing data, and those that do tend to rely on standard approaches that assume missing data are missing at random, such as the Expectation-Maximisation algorithm. Because missing data are often systematic, there is a need for more pragmatic methods that can effectively deal with data sets containing missing values not missing at random. The absence of approaches that deal with systematic missing data impedes the application of BN structure learning methods to real-world problems where missingness are not random. This paper describes three variants of greedy search structure learning that utilise pairwise deletion and inverse probability weighting to maximally leverage the observed data and to limit potential bias caused by missing values. The first two of the variants can be viewed as sub-versions of the third and best performing variant, but are important in their own in illustrating the successive improvements in learning accuracy. The empirical investigations show that the proposed approach outperforms the commonly used and state-of-the-art Structural EM algorithm, both in terms of learning accuracy and efficiency, as well as both when data are missing at random and not at random.

(2 min) In this paper, we continue our work on video relocalization task. Based on using graph convolution to extract intra-video and inter-video frame features, we improve the method by using similarity-metric based graph convolution, whose weighted adjacency matrix is achieved by calculating similarity metric between features of any two different time steps in the graph. Experiments on ActivityNet v1.2 and Thumos14 dataset show the effectiveness of this improvement, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

(2 min) Various controls over the generated data can be extracted from the latent space of a pre-trained GAN, as it implicitly encodes the semantics of the training data. The discovered controls allow to vary semantic attributes in the generated images but usually lead to entangled edits that affect multiple attributes at the same time. Supervised approaches typically sample and annotate a collection of latent codes, then train classifiers in the latent space to identify the controls. Since the data generated by GANs reflects the biases of the original dataset, so do the resulting semantic controls. We propose to address disentanglement by subsampling the generated data to remove over-represented co-occuring attributes thus balancing the semantics of the dataset before training the classifiers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by extracting disentangled linear directions for face manipulation on two popular GAN architectures, PGGAN and StyleGAN, and two datasets, CelebAHQ and FFHQ. We show that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art classifier-based methods while avoiding the need for disentanglement-enforcing post-processing.

(3 min) Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant success across a wide range of domains, such as game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics and finance. However, DRL and deep MARL agents are widely known to be sample-inefficient and millions of interactions are usually needed even for relatively simple game settings, thus preventing the wide application in real-industry scenarios. One bottleneck challenge behind is the well-known exploration problem, i.e., how to efficiently explore the unknown environments and collect informative experiences that could benefit the policy learning most. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on existing exploration methods in DRL and deep MARL for the purpose of providing understandings and insights on the critical problems and solutions. We first identify several key challenges to achieve efficient exploration, which most of the exploration methods aim at addressing. Then we provide a systematic survey of existing approaches by classifying them into two major categories: uncertainty-oriented exploration and intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration. The essence of uncertainty-oriented exploration is to leverage the quantification of the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to derive efficient exploration. By contrast, intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration methods usually incorporate different reward agnostic information for intrinsic exploration guidance. Beyond the above two main branches, we also conclude other exploration methods which adopt sophisticated techniques but are difficult to be classified into the above two categories. In addition, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of exploration methods for DRL on a set of commonly used benchmarks. Finally, we summarize the open problems of exploration in DRL and deep MARL and point out a few future directions.

(2 min) Pre-training lays the foundation for recent successes in radiograph analysis supported by deep learning. It learns transferable image representations by conducting large-scale fully-supervised or self-supervised learning on a source domain. However, supervised pre-training requires a complex and labor intensive two-stage human-assisted annotation process while self-supervised learning cannot compete with the supervised paradigm. To tackle these issues, we propose a cross-supervised methodology named REviewing FreE-text Reports for Supervision (REFERS), which acquires free supervision signals from original radiology reports accompanying the radiographs. The proposed approach employs a vision transformer and is designed to learn joint representations from multiple views within every patient study. REFERS outperforms its transfer learning and self-supervised learning counterparts on 4 well-known X-ray datasets under extremely limited supervision. Moreover, REFERS even surpasses methods based on a source domain of radiographs with human-assisted structured labels. Thus REFERS has the potential to replace canonical pre-training methodologies.

(2 min) Human-centered systems of systems such as social networks, Internet of Things, or healthcare systems are growingly becoming major facets of modern life. Realistic models of human behavior in such systems play a significant role in their accurate modeling and prediction. Yet, human behavior under uncertainty often violates the predictions by the conventional probabilistic models. Recently, quantum-like decision theories have shown a considerable potential to explain the contradictions in human behavior by applying quantum probability. But providing a quantum-like decision theory that could predict, rather than describe the current, state of human behavior is still one of the unsolved challenges. The main novelty of our approach is introducing an entangled Bayesian network inspired by the entanglement concept in quantum information theory, in which each human is a part of the entire society. Accordingly, society's effect on the dynamic evolution of the decision-making process, which is less often considered in decision theories, is modeled by the entanglement measures. The proposed predictive entangled quantum-like Bayesian network (PEQBN) is evaluated on 22 experimental tasks. Results confirm that PEQBN provides more realistic predictions of human decisions under uncertainty, when compared with classical Bayesian networks and three recent quantum-like approaches.

(2 min) Federated Edge Learning (FEEL) involves the collaborative training of machine learning models among edge devices, with the orchestration of a server in a wireless edge network. Due to frequent model updates, FEEL needs to be adapted to the limited communication bandwidth, scarce energy of edge devices, and the statistical heterogeneity of edge devices' data distributions. Therefore, a careful scheduling of a subset of devices for training and uploading models is necessary. In contrast to previous work in FEEL where the data aspects are under-explored, we consider data properties at the heart of the proposed scheduling algorithm. To this end, we propose a new scheduling scheme for non-independent and-identically-distributed (non-IID) and unbalanced datasets in FEEL. As the data is the key component of the learning, we propose a new set of considerations for data characteristics in wireless scheduling algorithms in FEEL. In fact, the data collected by the devices depends on the local environment and usage pattern. Thus, the datasets vary in size and distributions among the devices. In the proposed algorithm, we consider both data and resource perspectives. In addition to minimizing the completion time of FEEL as well as the transmission energy of the participating devices, the algorithm prioritizes devices with rich and diverse datasets. We first define a general framework for the data-aware scheduling and the main axes and requirements for diversity evaluation. Then, we discuss diversity aspects and some exploitable techniques and metrics. Next, we formulate the problem and present our FEEL scheduling algorithm. Evaluations in different scenarios show that our proposed FEEL scheduling algorithm can help achieve high accuracy in few rounds with a reduced cost.

(2 min) Neural networks are capable of learning powerful representations of data, but they are susceptible to overfitting due to the number of parameters. This is particularly challenging in the domain of time series classification, where datasets may contain fewer than 100 training examples. In this paper, we show that the simple methods of cutout, cutmix, mixup, and window warp improve the robustness and overall performance in a statistically significant way for convolutional, recurrent, and self-attention based architectures for time series classification. We evaluate these methods on 26 datasets from the University of East Anglia Multivariate Time Series Classification (UEA MTSC) archive and analyze how these methods perform on different types of time series data.. We show that the InceptionTime network with augmentation improves accuracy by 1% to 45% in 18 different datasets compared to without augmentation. We also show that augmentation improves accuracy for recurrent and self attention based architectures.

(2 min) Farmers frequently assess plant growth and performance as basis for making decisions when to take action in the field, such as fertilization, weed control, or harvesting. The prediction of plant growth is a major challenge, as it is affected by numerous and highly variable environmental factors. This paper proposes a novel monitoring approach that comprises high-throughput imaging sensor measurements and their automatic analysis to predict future plant growth. Our approach's core is a novel machine learning-based generative growth model based on conditional generative adversarial networks, which is able to predict the future appearance of individual plants. In experiments with RGB time-series images of laboratory-grown Arabidopsis thaliana and field-grown cauliflower plants, we show that our approach produces realistic, reliable, and reasonable images of future growth stages. The automatic interpretation of the generated images through neural network-based instance segmentation allows the derivation of various phenotypic traits that describe plant growth.

(2 min) Visual sentiment analysis has received increasing attention in recent years. However, the dataset's quality is a concern because the sentiment labels are crowd-sourcing, subjective, and prone to mistakes, and poses a severe threat to the data-driven models, especially the deep neural networks. The deep models would generalize poorly on the testing cases when trained to over-fit the training samples with noisy sentiment labels. Inspired by the recent progress on learning with noisy labels, we propose a robust learning method to perform robust visual sentiment analysis. Our method relies on external memory to aggregate and filters noisy labels during training. The memory is composed of the prototypes with corresponding labels, which can be updated online. The learned prototypes and their labels can be regarded as denoising features and labels for the local regions and can guide the training process to prevent the model from overfitting the noisy cases. We establish a benchmark for visual sentiment analysis with label noise using publicly available datasets. The experiment results of the proposed benchmark settings comprehensively show the effectiveness of our method.

(2 min) Active learning can be defined as iterations of data labeling, model training, and data acquisition, until sufficient labels are acquired. A traditional view of data acquisition is that, through iterations, knowledge from human labels and models is implicitly distilled to monotonically increase the accuracy and label consistency. Under this assumption, the most recently trained model is a good surrogate for the current labeled data, from which data acquisition is requested based on uncertainty/diversity. Our contribution is debunking this myth and proposing a new objective for distillation. First, we found example forgetting, which indicates the loss of knowledge learned across iterations. Second, for this reason, the last model is no longer the best teacher -- For mitigating such forgotten knowledge, we select one of its predecessor models as a teacher, by our proposed notion of "consistency". We show that this novel distillation is distinctive in the following three aspects; First, consistency ensures to avoid forgetting labels. Second, consistency improves both uncertainty/diversity of labeled data. Lastly, consistency redeems defective labels produced by human annotators.

(2 min) Model-based algorithms, which learn a dynamics model from logged experience and perform some sort of pessimistic planning under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL). However, practical variants of such model-based algorithms rely on explicit uncertainty quantification for incorporating pessimism. Uncertainty estimation with complex models, such as deep neural networks, can be difficult and unreliable. We overcome this limitation by developing a new model-based offline RL algorithm, COMBO, that regularizes the value function on out-of-support state-action tuples generated via rollouts under the learned model. This results in a conservative estimate of the value function for out-of-support state-action tuples, without requiring explicit uncertainty estimation. We theoretically show that our method optimizes a lower bound on the true policy value, that this bound is tighter than that of prior methods, and our approach satisfies a policy improvement guarantee in the offline setting. Through experiments, we find that COMBO consistently performs as well or better as compared to prior offline model-free and model-based methods on widely studied offline RL benchmarks, including image-based tasks.

(2 min) User data confidentiality protection is becoming a rising challenge in the present deep learning research. Without access to data, conventional data-driven model compression faces a higher risk of performance degradation. Recently, some works propose to generate images from a specific pretrained model to serve as training data. However, the inversion process only utilizes biased feature statistics stored in one model and is from low-dimension to high-dimension. As a consequence, it inevitably encounters the difficulties of generalizability and inexact inversion, which leads to unsatisfactory performance. To address these problems, we propose MixMix based on two simple yet effective techniques: (1) Feature Mixing: utilizes various models to construct a universal feature space for generalized inversion; (2) Data Mixing: mixes the synthesized images and labels to generate exact label information. We prove the effectiveness of MixMix from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Extensive experiments show that MixMix outperforms existing methods on the mainstream compression tasks, including quantization, knowledge distillation, and pruning. Specifically, MixMix achieves up to 4% and 20% accuracy uplift on quantization and pruning, respectively, compared to existing data-free compression work.

(2 min) We present differentiable predictive control (DPC), a method for learning constrained neural control policies for linear systems with probabilistic performance guarantees. We employ automatic differentiation to obtain direct policy gradients by backpropagating the model predictive control (MPC) loss function and constraints penalties through a differentiable closed-loop system dynamics model. We demonstrate that the proposed method can learn parametric constrained control policies to stabilize systems with unstable dynamics, track time-varying references, and satisfy nonlinear state and input constraints. In contrast with imitation learning-based approaches, our method does not depend on a supervisory controller. Most importantly, we demonstrate that, without losing performance, our method is scalable and computationally more efficient than implicit, explicit, and approximate MPC. Under review at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

(2 min) Recent advances in neural forecasting have produced major improvements in accuracy for probabilistic demand prediction. In this work, we propose novel improvements to the current state of the art by incorporating changes inspired by recent advances in Transformer architectures for Natural Language Processing. We develop a novel decoder-encoder attention for context-alignment, improving forecasting accuracy by allowing the network to study its own history based on the context for which it is producing a forecast. We also present a novel positional encoding that allows the neural network to learn context-dependent seasonality functions as well as arbitrary holiday distances. Finally we show that the current state of the art MQ-Forecaster (Wen et al., 2017) models display excess variability by failing to leverage previous errors in the forecast to improve accuracy. We propose a novel decoder-self attention scheme for forecasting that produces significant improvements in the excess variation of the forecast.

(2 min) In this work, we propose a new variant of natural evolution strategies (NES) for high-dimensional black-box optimization problems. The proposed method, CR-FM-NES, extends a recently proposed state-of-the-art NES, Fast Moving Natural Evolution Strategy (FM-NES), in order to be applicable in high-dimensional problems. CR-FM-NES builds on an idea using a restricted representation of a covariance matrix instead of using a full covariance matrix, while inheriting an efficiency of FM-NES. The restricted representation of the covariance matrix enables CR-FM-NES to update parameters of a multivariate normal distribution in linear time and space complexity, which can be applied to high-dimensional problems. Our experimental results reveal that CR-FM-NES does not lose the efficiency of FM-NES, and on the contrary, CR-FM-NES has achieved significant speedup compared to FM-NES on some benchmark problems. Furthermore, our numerical experiments using 200, 600, and 1000-dimensional benchmark problems demonstrate that CR-FM-NES is effective over scalable baseline methods, VD-CMA and Sep-CMA.

(2 min) Mutual knowledge distillation (MKD) improves a model by distilling knowledge from another model. However, \textit{not all knowledge is certain and correct}, especially under adverse conditions. For example, label noise usually leads to less reliable models due to undesired memorization \cite{zhang2017understanding,arpit2017closer}. Wrong knowledge misleads the learning rather than helps. This problem can be handled by two aspects: (i) improving the reliability of a model where the knowledge is from (i.e., knowledge source's reliability); (ii) selecting reliable knowledge for distillation. In the literature, making a model more reliable is widely studied while selective MKD receives little attention. Therefore, we focus on studying selective MKD. Concretely, a generic MKD framework, \underline{C}onfident knowledge selection followed by \underline{M}utual \underline{D}istillation (CMD), is designed. The key component of CMD is a generic knowledge selection formulation, making the selection threshold either static (CMD-S) or progressive (CMD-P). Additionally, CMD covers two special cases: zero-knowledge and all knowledge, leading to a unified MKD framework. Extensive experiments are present to demonstrate the effectiveness of CMD and thoroughly justify the design of CMD. For example, CMD-P obtains new state-of-the-art results in robustness against label noise.

(2 min) Unmeasured or latent variables are often the cause of correlations between multivariate measurements, which are studied in a variety of fields such as psychology, ecology, and medicine. For Gaussian measurements, there are classical tools such as factor analysis or principal component analysis with a well-established theory and fast algorithms. Generalized Linear Latent Variable models (GLLVMs) generalize such factor models to non-Gaussian responses. However, current algorithms for estimating model parameters in GLLVMs require intensive computation and do not scale to large datasets with thousands of observational units or responses. In this article, we propose a new approach for fitting GLLVMs to high-dimensional datasets, based on approximating the model using penalized quasi-likelihood and then using a Newton method and Fisher scoring to learn the model parameters. Computationally, our method is noticeably faster and more stable, enabling GLLVM fits to much larger matrices than previously possible. We apply our method on a dataset of 48,000 observational units with over 2,000 observed species in each unit and find that most of the variability can be explained with a handful of factors. We publish an easy-to-use implementation of our proposed fitting algorithm.

(2 min) In reinforcement learning, it is common to let an agent interact for a fixed amount of time with its environment before resetting it and repeating the process in a series of episodes. The task that the agent has to learn can either be to maximize its performance over (i) that fixed period, or (ii) an indefinite period where time limits are only used during training to diversify experience. In this paper, we provide a formal account for how time limits could effectively be handled in each of the two cases and explain why not doing so can cause state aliasing and invalidation of experience replay, leading to suboptimal policies and training instability. In case (i), we argue that the terminations due to time limits are in fact part of the environment, and thus a notion of the remaining time should be included as part of the agent's input to avoid violation of the Markov property. In case (ii), the time limits are not part of the environment and are only used to facilitate learning. We argue that this insight should be incorporated by bootstrapping from the value of the state at the end of each partial episode. For both cases, we illustrate empirically the significance of our considerations in improving the performance and stability of existing reinforcement learning algorithms, showing state-of-the-art results on several control tasks.

(2 min) Deep generative modeling using flows has gained popularity owing to the tractable exact log-likelihood estimation with efficient training and synthesis process. However, flow models suffer from the challenge of having high dimensional latent space, the same in dimension as the input space. An effective solution to the above challenge as proposed by Dinh et al. (2016) is a multi-scale architecture, which is based on iterative early factorization of a part of the total dimensions at regular intervals. Prior works on generative flow models involving a multi-scale architecture perform the dimension factorization based on static masking. We propose a novel multi-scale architecture that performs data-dependent factorization to decide which dimensions should pass through more flow layers. To facilitate the same, we introduce a heuristic based on the contribution of each dimension to the total log-likelihood which encodes the importance of the dimensions. Our proposed heuristic is readily obtained as part of the flow training process, enabling the versatile implementation of our likelihood contribution based multi-scale architecture for generic flow models. We present such implementations for several state-of-the-art flow models and demonstrate improvements in log-likelihood score and sampling quality on standard image benchmarks. We also conduct ablation studies to compare the proposed method with other options for dimension factorization.

(2 min) Gaussian process regression is a widely-applied method for function approximation and uncertainty quantification. The technique has gained popularity recently in the machine learning community due to its robustness and interpretability. The mathematical methods we discuss in this paper are an extension of the Gaussian-process framework. We are proposing advanced kernel designs that only allow for functions with certain desirable characteristics to be elements of the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) that underlies all kernel methods and serves as the sample space for Gaussian process regression. These desirable characteristics reflect the underlying physics; two obvious examples are symmetry and periodicity constraints. In addition, non-stationary kernel designs can be defined in the same framework to yield flexible multi-task Gaussian processes. We will show the impact of advanced kernel designs on Gaussian processes using several synthetic and two scientific data sets. The results show that including domain knowledge, communicated through advanced kernel designs, has a significant impact on the accuracy and relevance of the function approximation.

(2 min) Self-supervised learning is an emerging machine learning (ML) paradigm. Compared to supervised learning that leverages high-quality labeled datasets to achieve good performance, self-supervised learning relies on unlabeled datasets to pre-train powerful encoders which can then be treated as feature extractors for various downstream tasks. The huge amount of data and computational resources consumption makes the encoders themselves become a valuable intellectual property of the model owner. Recent research has shown that the ML model's copyright is threatened by model stealing attacks, which aims to train a surrogate model to mimic the behavior of a given model. We empirically show that pre-trained encoders are highly vulnerable to model stealing attacks. However, most of the current efforts of copyright protection algorithms such as fingerprinting and watermarking concentrate on classifiers. Meanwhile, the intrinsic challenges of pre-trained encoder's copyright protection remain largely unstudied. We fill the gap by proposing SSLGuard, the first watermarking algorithm for pre-trained encoders. Given a clean pre-trained encoder, SSLGuard embeds a watermark into it and outputs a watermarked version. The shadow training technique is also applied to preserve the watermark under potential model stealing attacks. Our extensive evaluation shows that SSLGuard is effective in watermark injection and verification, and is robust against model stealing and other watermark removal attacks such as pruning and finetuning.

(2 min) Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) can provide useful information for systems observed by transit, by putting constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets, or even constrain the existence of non-transiting companions. However, TTVs can also prevent the detection of small planets in transit surveys, or bias the recovered planetary and transit parameters. Here we show that Kepler-1972 c, initially the "not transit-like" false positive KOI-3184.02, is an Earth-sized planet whose orbit is perturbed by Kepler-1972 b (initially KOI-3184.01). The pair is locked in a 3:2 Mean-motion resonance, each planet displaying TTVs of more than 6h hours of amplitude over the duration of the Kepler mission. The two planets have similar masses $m_b/m_c =0.956_{-0.051}^{+0.056}$ and radii $R_b=0.802_{-0.041}^{+0.042}R_{Earth}$, $R_c=0.868_{-0.050}^{+0.051}R_{Earth}$, and the whole system, including the inner candidate KOI-3184.03, appear to be coplanar. Despite the faintness of the signals (SNR of 1.35 for each transit of Kepler-1972 b and 1.10 for Kepler-1972 c), we recovered the transits of the planets using the RIVERS method, based on the recognition of the tracks of planets in river diagrams using machine learning, and a photo-dynamic fit of the lightcurve. Recovering the correct ephemerides of the planets is essential to have a complete picture of the observed planetary systems. In particular, we show that in Kepler-1972, not taking into account planet-planet interactions yields an error of $\sim 30\%$ on the radii of planets b and c, in addition to generating in-transit scatter, which leads to mistake KOI3184.02 for a false positive. Alleviating this bias is essential for an unbiased view of Kepler systems, some of the TESS stars, and the upcoming PLATO mission.

(2 min) Deep learning based electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing methods are known to suffer from poor test-time generalization due to the changes in data distribution. This becomes a more challenging problem when privacy-preserving representation learning is of interest such as in clinical settings. To that end, we propose a multi-source learning architecture where we extract domain-invariant representations from dataset-specific private encoders. Our model utilizes a maximum-mean-discrepancy (MMD) based domain alignment approach to impose domain-invariance for encoded representations, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in EEG-based emotion classification. Furthermore, representations learned in our pipeline preserve domain privacy as dataset-specific private encoding alleviates the need for conventional, centralized EEG-based deep neural network training approaches with shared parameters.

(2 min) In the pursuit of explaining implicit regularization in deep learning, prominent focus was given to matrix and tensor factorizations, which correspond to simplified neural networks. It was shown that these models exhibit implicit regularization towards low matrix and tensor ranks, respectively. Drawing closer to practical deep learning, the current paper theoretically analyzes the implicit regularization in hierarchical tensor factorization, a model equivalent to certain deep convolutional neural networks. Through a dynamical systems lens, we overcome challenges associated with hierarchy, and establish implicit regularization towards low hierarchical tensor rank. This translates to an implicit regularization towards locality for the associated convolutional networks. Inspired by our theory, we design explicit regularization discouraging locality, and demonstrate its ability to improve performance of modern convolutional networks on non-local tasks, in defiance of conventional wisdom by which architectural changes are needed. Our work highlights the potential of enhancing neural networks via theoretical analysis of their implicit regularization.

(2 min) High levels of missing data and strong class imbalance are ubiquitous challenges that are often presented simultaneously in real-world time series data. Existing methods approach these problems separately, frequently making significant assumptions about the underlying data generation process in order to lessen the impact of missing information. In this work, we instead demonstrate how a general self-supervised training method, namely Autoregressive Predictive Coding (APC), can be leveraged to overcome both missing data and class imbalance simultaneously without strong assumptions. Specifically, on a synthetic dataset, we show that standard baselines are substantially improved upon through the use of APC, yielding the greatest gains in the combined setting of high missingness and severe class imbalance. We further apply APC on two real-world medical time-series datasets, and show that APC improves the classification performance in all settings, ultimately achieving state-of-the-art AUPRC results on the Physionet benchmark.

(2 min) Wavelet transformation stands as a cornerstone in modern data analysis and signal processing. Its mathematical essence is an invertible transformation that discerns slow patterns from fast ones in the frequency domain. Such an invertible transformation can be learned by a designed normalizing flow model. With a generalized lifting scheme as coupling layers, a factor-out layer resembling the downsampling, and parameter sharing at different levels of the model, one can train the normalizing flow to filter high-frequency elements at different levels, thus extending traditional linear wavelet transformations to learnable non-linear deep learning models. In this paper, a way of building such flow is proposed, along with a numerical analysis of the learned transformation. Then, we demonstrate the model's ability in image lossless compression, show it can achieve SOTA compression scores while achieving a small model size, substantial generalization ability, and the ability to handle high-dimensional data.

(2 min) Many applications affecting human lives rely on models that have come to be known under the umbrella of machine learning and artificial intelligence. These AI models are usually complicated mathematical functions that map from an input space to an output space. Stakeholders are interested to know the rationales behind models' decisions and functional behavior. We study this functional behavior in relation to the data used to create the models. On this topic, scholars have often assumed that models do not extrapolate, i.e., they learn from their training samples and process new input by interpolation. This assumption is questionable: we show that models extrapolate frequently; the extent of extrapolation varies and can be socially consequential. We demonstrate that extrapolation happens for a substantial portion of datasets more than one would consider reasonable. How can we trust models if we do not know whether they are extrapolating? Given a model trained to recommend clinical procedures for patients, can we trust the recommendation when the model considers a patient older or younger than all the samples in the training set? If the training set is mostly Whites, to what extent can we trust its recommendations about Black and Hispanic patients? Which dimension (race, gender, or age) does extrapolation happen? Even if a model is trained on people of all races, it still may extrapolate in significant ways related to race. The leading question is, to what extent can we trust AI models when they process inputs that fall outside their training set? This paper investigates several social applications of AI, showing how models extrapolate without notice. We also look at different sub-spaces of extrapolation for specific individuals subject to AI models and report how these extrapolations can be interpreted, not mathematically, but from a humanistic point of view.

(2 min) Recent research suggests that predictions made by machine-learning models can amplify biases present in the training data. When a model amplifies bias, it makes certain predictions at a higher rate for some groups than expected based on training-data statistics. Mitigating such bias amplification requires a deep understanding of the mechanics in modern machine learning that give rise to that amplification. We perform the first systematic, controlled study into when and how bias amplification occurs. To enable this study, we design a simple image-classification problem in which we can tightly control (synthetic) biases. Our study of this problem reveals that the strength of bias amplification is correlated to measures such as model accuracy, model capacity, model overconfidence, and amount of training data. We also find that bias amplification can vary greatly during training. Finally, we find that bias amplification may depend on the difficulty of the classification task relative to the difficulty of recognizing group membership: bias amplification appears to occur primarily when it is easier to recognize group membership than class membership. Our results suggest best practices for training machine-learning models that we hope will help pave the way for the development of better mitigation strategies.

(2 min) Effective and timely responses to unexpected contingencies are crucial for enhancing the resilience of power grids. Given the fast, complex process of cascading propagation, corrective actions such as optimal load shedding (OLS) are difficult to attain in large-scale networks due to the computation complexity and communication latency issues. This work puts forth an innovative learning-for-OLS approach by constructing the optimal decision rules of load shedding under a variety of potential contingency scenarios through offline neural network (NN) training. Notably, the proposed NN-based OLS decisions are fully decentralized, enabling individual load centers to quickly react to the specific contingency using readily available local measurements. Numerical studies on the IEEE 14-bus system have demonstrated the effectiveness of our scalable OLS design for real-time responses to severe grid emergency events.

(2 min) Recent work has established clear links between the generalization performance of trained neural networks and the geometry of their loss landscape near the local minima to which they converge. This suggests that qualitative and quantitative examination of the loss landscape geometry could yield insights about neural network generalization performance during training. To this end, researchers have proposed visualizing the loss landscape through the use of simple dimensionality reduction techniques. However, such visualization methods have been limited by their linear nature and only capture features in one or two dimensions, thus restricting sampling of the loss landscape to lines or planes. Here, we expand and improve upon these in three ways. First, we present a novel "jump and retrain" procedure for sampling relevant portions of the loss landscape. We show that the resulting sampled data holds more meaningful information about the network's ability to generalize. Next, we show that non-linear dimensionality reduction of the jump and retrain trajectories via PHATE, a trajectory and manifold-preserving method, allows us to visualize differences between networks that are generalizing well vs poorly. Finally, we combine PHATE trajectories with a computational homology characterization to quantify trajectory differences.

(2 min) Determining the positions of neurons in an extracellular recording is useful for investigating functional properties of the underlying neural circuitry. In this work, we present a Bayesian modelling approach for localizing the source of individual spikes on high-density, microelectrode arrays. To allow for scalable inference, we implement our model as a variational autoencoder and perform amortized variational inference. We evaluate our method on both biophysically realistic simulated and real extracellular datasets, demonstrating that it is more accurate than and can improve spike sorting performance over heuristic localization methods such as center of mass.

(2 min) Weighting methods are a common tool to de-bias estimates of causal effects. And though there are an increasing number of seemingly disparate methods, many of them can be folded into one unifying regime: Causal Optimal Transport. This new method directly targets distributional balance by minimizing optimal transport distances between treatment and control groups or, more generally, between a source and target population. Our approach is semiparametrically efficient and model-free but can also incorporate moments or any other important functions of covariates that the researcher desires to balance. We find that Causal Optimal Transport outperforms competitor methods when both the propensity score and outcome models are misspecified, indicating it is a robust alternative to common weighting methods. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our method in an external control study examining the effect of misoprostol versus oxytocin for the treatment of post-partum hemorrhage.

(2 min) Novel and high-performance medical image classification pipelines are heavily utilizing ensemble learning strategies. The idea of ensemble learning is to assemble diverse models or multiple predictions and, thus, boost prediction performance. However, it is still an open question to what extent as well as which ensemble learning strategies are beneficial in deep learning based medical image classification pipelines. In this work, we proposed a reproducible medical image classification pipeline for analyzing the performance impact of the following ensemble learning techniques: Augmenting, Stacking, and Bagging. The pipeline consists of state-of-the-art preprocessing and image augmentation methods as well as 9 deep convolution neural network architectures. It was applied on four popular medical imaging datasets with varying complexity. Furthermore, 12 pooling functions for combining multiple predictions were analyzed, ranging from simple statistical functions like unweighted averaging up to more complex learning-based functions like support vector machines. Our results revealed that Stacking achieved the largest performance gain of up to 13% F1-score increase. Augmenting showed consistent improvement capabilities by up to 4% and is also applicable to single model based pipelines. Cross-validation based Bagging demonstrated to be the most complex ensemble learning method, which resulted in an F1-score decrease in all analyzed datasets (up to -10%). Furthermore, we demonstrated that simple statistical pooling functions are equal or often even better than more complex pooling functions. We concluded that the integration of Stacking and Augmentation ensemble learning techniques is a powerful method for any medical image classification pipeline to improve robustness and boost performance.

(2 min) Bregman proximal point algorithm (BPPA), as one of the centerpieces in the optimization toolbox, has been witnessing emerging applications. With simple and easy to implement update rule, the algorithm bears several compelling intuitions for empirical successes, yet rigorous justifications are still largely unexplored. We study the computational properties of BPPA through classification tasks with separable data, and demonstrate provable algorithmic regularization effects associated with BPPA. We show that BPPA attains non-trivial margin, which closely depends on the condition number of the distance generating function inducing the Bregman divergence. We further demonstrate that the dependence on the condition number is tight for a class of problems, thus showing the importance of divergence in affecting the quality of the obtained solutions. In addition, we extend our findings to mirror descent (MD), for which we establish similar connections between the margin and Bregman divergence. We demonstrate through a concrete example, and show BPPA/MD converges in direction to the maximal margin solution with respect to the Mahalanobis distance. Our theoretical findings are among the first to demonstrate the benign learning properties BPPA/MD, and also provide corroborations for a careful choice of divergence in the algorithmic design.

(2 min) Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently attracted vast interest and achieved state-of-the-art performance on graphs, but its success could typically hinge on careful training with amounts of expensive and time-consuming labeled data. To alleviate labeled data scarcity, self-training methods have been widely adopted on graphs by labeling high-confidence unlabeled nodes and then adding them to the training step. In this line, we empirically make a thorough study for current self-training methods on graphs. Surprisingly, we find that high-confidence unlabeled nodes are not always useful, and even introduce the distribution shift issue between the original labeled dataset and the augmented dataset by self-training, severely hindering the capability of self-training on graphs. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Distribution Recovered Graph Self-Training framework (DR-GST), which could recover the distribution of the original labeled dataset. Specifically, we first prove the equality of loss function in self-training framework under the distribution shift case and the population distribution if each pseudo-labeled node is weighted by a proper coefficient. Considering the intractability of the coefficient, we then propose to replace the coefficient with the information gain after observing the same changing trend between them, where information gain is respectively estimated via both dropout variational inference and dropedge variational inference in DR-GST. However, such a weighted loss function will enlarge the impact of incorrect pseudo labels. As a result, we apply the loss correction method to improve the quality of pseudo labels. Both our theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DR-GST, as well as each well-designed component in DR-GST.

(2 min) We study the problem of learning representations that are private yet informative i.e., provide information about intended "ally" targets while hiding sensitive "adversary" attributes). We propose Exclusion-Inclusion Generative Adversarial Network (EIGAN), a generalized private representation learning (PRL) architecture that accounts for multiple ally and adversary attributes unlike existing PRL solutions. While centrally-aggregated dataset is a prerequisite for most PRL techniques, data in real-world is often siloed across multiple distributed nodes unwilling to share the raw data because of privacy concerns. We address this practical constraint by developing D-EIGAN, the first distributed PRL method that learns representations at each node without transmitting the source data. We theoretically analyze the behavior of adversaries under the optimal EIGAN and D-EIGAN encoders and the impact of dependencies among ally and adversary tasks on the optimization objective. Our experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantages of EIGAN in terms of performance, robustness, and scalability. In particular, EIGAN outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a significant accuracy margin (47% improvement), and D-EIGAN's performance is consistently on par with EIGAN under different network settings.

(2 min) Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a robust recurrent neural network architecture for learning spatiotemporal sequential data. However, it requires significant computational power for learning and implementing from both software and hardware aspects. This paper proposes a novel LiteLSTM architecture based on reducing the computation components of the LSTM using the weights sharing concept to reduce the overall architecture cost and maintain the architecture performance. The proposed LiteLSTM can be significant for learning big data where time-consumption is crucial such as the security of IoT devices and medical data. Moreover, it helps to reduce the CO2 footprint. The proposed model was evaluated and tested empirically on two different datasets from computer vision and cybersecurity domains.

(2 min) Voluntary human motion is the product of muscle activity that results from upstream motion planning of the motor cortical areas. We show that muscle activity can be artificially generated based on motion features such as position, velocity, and acceleration. For this purpose, we specifically develop an approach based on recurrent neural network that is trained in a supervised learning session; additional neural network architectures are considered and evaluated. The performance is evaluated by a new score called the zero-line score. The latter adaptively rescales the loss function of the generated signal for all channels comparing the overall range of muscle activity and thus dynamically evaluates similarities between both signals. The model achieves remarkable precision for previously trained movements and maintains significantly high precision for new movements that have not been previously trained. Further, these models are trained on multiple subjects and thus are able to generalize across individuals. In addition, we distinguish between a general model that has been trained on several subjects, a subject-specific model, and a specific pre-trained model that uses the general model as a basis and is adapted to a specific subject afterward. The subject-specific generation of muscle activity can be further used to improve the rehabilitation of neuromuscular diseases with myoelectric prostheses and functional electric stimulation.

(2 min) Network load balancers are central components in modern data centers, that cooperatively distribute workloads of high arrival rates across application servers, thereby contribute to offering scalable services. The independent and "selfish" load balancing strategy is not necessarily the globally optimal one. This paper represents the load balancing problem as a cooperative team-game with limited observations over system states, and adopts multi-agent reinforcement learning methods to make fair load balancing decisions without inducing additional processing latency. On both a simulation and an emulation system, the proposed method is evaluated against other load balancing algorithms, including state-of-the-art heuristics and learning-based strategies. Experiments under different settings and complexities show the advantageous performance of the proposed method.

(2 min) In recent years, social media has enabled users to get exposed to a myriad of misinformation and disinformation; thus, misinformation has attracted a great deal of attention in research fields and as a social issue. To address the problem, we propose a framework, Pre-CoFact, composed of two pre-trained models for extracting features from text and images, and multiple co-attention networks for fusing the same modality but different sources and different modalities. Besides, we adopt the ensemble method by using different pre-trained models in Pre-CoFact to achieve better performance. We further illustrate the effectiveness from the ablation study and examine different pre-trained models for comparison. Our team, Yao, won the fifth prize (F1-score: 74.585\%) in the Factify challenge hosted by De-Factify @ AAAI 2022, which demonstrates that our model achieved competitive performance without using auxiliary tasks or extra information. The source code of our work is publicly available at https://github.com/wywyWang/Multi-Modal-Fact-Verification-2021

(2 min) Characterizing meltpool shape and geometry is essential in metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) to control the printing process and avoid defects. Predicting meltpool flaws based on process parameters and powder material is difficult due to the complex nature of MAM process. Machine learning (ML) techniques can be useful in connecting process parameters to the type of flaws in the meltpool. In this work, we introduced a comprehensive framework for benchmarking ML for melt pool characterization. An extensive experimental dataset has been collected from more than 80 MAM articles containing MAM processing conditions, materials, meltpool dimensions, meltpool modes and flaw types. We introduced physics-aware MAM featurization, versatile ML models, and evaluation metrics to create a comprehensive learning framework for meltpool defect and geometry prediction. This benchmark can serve as a basis for melt pool control and process optimization. In addition, data-driven explicit models have been identified to estimate meltpool geometry from process parameters and material properties which outperform Rosenthal estimation for meltpool geometry while maintaining interpretability.

(2 min) In Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), models are trained using bags of instances, where only a single label is provided for each bag. A bag label is often only determined by a handful of key instances within a bag, making it difficult to interpret what information a classifier is using to make decisions. In this work, we establish the key requirements for interpreting MIL models. We then go on to develop several model-agnostic approaches that meet these requirements. Our methods are compared against existing inherently interpretable MIL models on several datasets, and achieve an increase in interpretability accuracy of up to 30%. We also examine the ability of the methods to identify interactions between instances and scale to larger datasets, improving their applicability to real-world problems.

(2 min) Biosensors are an essential tool for medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring and food safety. Typically, biosensors are designed to detect specific analytes through functionalization with the appropriate capture agents. However, the use of capture agents limits the number of analytes that can be simultaneously detected and reduces the robustness of the biosensor. In this work, we report a versatile, capture agent free biosensor platform based on an array of porous silicon (PSi) thin films, which has the potential to robustly detect a wide variety of analytes based on their physical and chemical properties in the nanoscale porous media. The ability of this system to reproducibly classify, quantify, and discriminate three proteins is demonstrated to concentrations down to at least 0.02g/L (between 300nM and 450nM) by utilizing PSi array elements with a unique combination of pore size and buffer pH, employing linear discriminant analysis for dimensionality reduction, and using support vector machines as a classifier. This approach represents a significant step towards a low cost, simple and robust biosensor platform that is able to detect a vast range of biomolecules.

(2 min) Pair-wise loss is an approach to metric learning that learns a semantic embedding by optimizing a loss function that encourages images from the same semantic class to be mapped closer than images from different classes. The literature reports a large and growing set of variations of the pair-wise loss strategies. Here we decompose the gradient of these loss functions into components that relate to how they push the relative feature positions of the anchor-positive and anchor-negative pairs. This decomposition allows the unification of a large collection of current pair-wise loss functions. Additionally, explicitly constructing pair-wise gradient updates to separate out these effects gives insights into which have the biggest impact, and leads to a simple algorithm that beats the state of the art for image retrieval on the CAR, CUB and Stanford Online products datasets.

(2 min) In this paper, we introduce a novel family of iterative algorithms which carry out $\alpha$-divergence minimisation in a Variational Inference context. They do so by ensuring a systematic decrease at each step in the $\alpha$-divergence between the variational and the posterior distributions. In its most general form, the variational distribution is a mixture model and our framework allows us to simultaneously optimise the weights and components parameters of this mixture model. Notably, our approach permits to build on various methods previously proposed for $\alpha$-divergence minimisation such as Gradient or Power Descent schemes and we also shed a new light on an integrated Expectation Maximization algorithm. Lastly, we provide empirical evidence that our methodology yields improved results on several multimodal target distributions.

(2 min) Applications of neural networks on edge systems have proliferated in recent years but the ever-increasing model size makes neural networks not able to deploy on resource-constrained microcontrollers efficiently. We propose bit-serial weight pools, an end-to-end framework that includes network compression and acceleration of arbitrary sub-byte precision. The framework can achieve up to 8x compression compared to 8-bit networks by sharing a pool of weights across the entire network. We further propose a bit-serial lookup based software implementation that allows runtime-bitwidth tradeoff and is able to achieve more than 2.8x speedup and 7.5x storage compression compared to 8-bit weight pool networks, with less than 1% accuracy drop.

(2 min) Computer-aided detection systems based on deep learning have shown great potential in breast cancer detection. However, the lack of domain generalization of artificial neural networks is an important obstacle to their deployment in changing clinical environments. In this work, we explore the domain generalization of deep learning methods for mass detection in digital mammography and analyze in-depth the sources of domain shift in a large-scale multi-center setting. To this end, we compare the performance of eight state-of-the-art detection methods, including Transformer-based models, trained in a single domain and tested in five unseen domains. Moreover, a single-source mass detection training pipeline is designed to improve the domain generalization without requiring images from the new domain. The results show that our workflow generalizes better than state-of-the-art transfer learning-based approaches in four out of five domains while reducing the domain shift caused by the different acquisition protocols and scanner manufacturers. Subsequently, an extensive analysis is performed to identify the covariate shifts with bigger effects on the detection performance, such as due to differences in patient age, breast density, mass size, and mass malignancy. Ultimately, this comprehensive study provides key insights and best practices for future research on domain generalization in deep learning-based breast cancer detection.

(2 min) We study linear filters for processing signals supported on abstract topological spaces modeled as simplicial complexes, which may be interpreted as generalizations of graphs that account for nodes, edges, triangular faces etc. To process such signals, we develop simplicial convolutional filters defined as matrix polynomials of the lower and upper Hodge Laplacians. First, we study the properties of these filters and show that they are linear and shift-invariant, as well as permutation and orientation equivariant. These filters can also be implemented in a distributed fashion with a low computational complexity, as they involve only (multiple rounds of) simplicial shifting between upper and lower adjacent simplices. Second, focusing on edge-flows, we study the frequency responses of these filters and examine how we can use the Hodge-decomposition to delineate gradient, curl and harmonic frequencies. We discuss how these frequencies correspond to the lower- and the upper-adjacent couplings and the kernel of the Hodge Laplacian, respectively, and can be tuned independently by our filter designs. Third, we study different procedures for designing simplicial convolutional filters and discuss their relative advantages. Finally, we corroborate our simplicial filters in several applications: to extract different frequency components of a simplicial signal, to denoise edge flows, and to analyze financial markets and traffic networks.

(2 min) The phenomenon of benign overfitting, where a predictor perfectly fits noisy training data while attaining low expected loss, has received much attention in recent years, but still remains not fully understood beyond simple linear regression setups. In this paper, we show that for regression, benign overfitting is "biased" towards certain types of problems, in the sense that its existence on one learning problem excludes its existence on other learning problems. On the negative side, we use this to argue that one should not expect benign overfitting to occur in general, for several natural extensions of the plain linear regression problems studied so far. We then turn to classification problems, and show that the situation there is much more favorable. Specifically, we consider a model where an arbitrary input distribution of some fixed dimension $k$ is concatenated with a high-dimensional distribution, and prove that the max-margin predictor (to which gradient-based methods are known to converge in direction) is asymptotically biased towards minimizing the expected *squared hinge loss* w.r.t. the $k$-dimensional distribution. This allows us to reduce the question of benign overfitting in classification to the simpler question of whether this loss is a good surrogate for the prediction error, and use it to show benign overfitting in some new settings.

(2 min) We study the problem of learning a mixture of multiple linear dynamical systems (LDSs) from unlabeled short sample trajectories, each generated by one of the LDS models. Despite the wide applicability of mixture models for time-series data, learning algorithms that come with end-to-end performance guarantees are largely absent from existing literature. There are multiple sources of technical challenges, including but not limited to (1) the presence of latent variables (i.e. the unknown labels of trajectories); (2) the possibility that the sample trajectories might have lengths much smaller than the dimension $d$ of the LDS models; and (3) the complicated temporal dependence inherent to time-series data. To tackle these challenges, we develop a two-stage meta-algorithm, which is guaranteed to efficiently recover each ground-truth LDS model up to error $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d/T})$, where $T$ is the total sample size. We validate our theoretical studies with numerical experiments, confirming the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

(2 min) While a lot of research in explainable AI focuses on producing effective explanations, less work is devoted to the question of how people understand and interpret the explanation. In this work, we focus on this question through a study of saliency-based explanations over textual data. Feature-attribution explanations of text models aim to communicate which parts of the input text were more influential than others towards the model decision. Many current explanation methods, such as gradient-based or Shapley value-based methods, provide measures of importance which are well-understood mathematically. But how does a person receiving the explanation (the explainee) comprehend it? And does their understanding match what the explanation attempted to communicate? We empirically investigate the effect of various factors of the input, the feature-attribution explanation, and visualization procedure, on laypeople's interpretation of the explanation. We query crowdworkers for their interpretation on tasks in English and German, and fit a GAMM model to their responses considering the factors of interest. We find that people often mis-interpret the explanations: superficial and unrelated factors, such as word length, influence the explainees' importance assignment despite the explanation communicating importance directly. We then show that some of this distortion can be attenuated: we propose a method to adjust saliencies based on model estimates of over- and under-perception, and explore bar charts as an alternative to heatmap saliency visualization. We find that both approaches can attenuate the distorting effect of specific factors, leading to better-calibrated understanding of the explanation.

(2 min) Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning (ML) technique that enables collaborative training in which devices perform learning using a local dataset while preserving their privacy. This technique ensures privacy, communication efficiency, and resource conservation. Despite these advantages, FL still suffers from several challenges related to reliability (i.e., unreliable participating devices in training), tractability (i.e., a large number of trained models), and anonymity. To address these issues, we propose a secure and trustworthy blockchain framework (SRB-FL) tailored to FL, which uses blockchain features to enable collaborative model training in a fully distributed and trustworthy manner. In particular, we design a secure FL based on the blockchain sharding that ensures data reliability, scalability, and trustworthiness. In addition, we introduce an incentive mechanism to improve the reliability of FL devices using subjective multi-weight logic. The results show that our proposed SRB-FL framework is efficient and scalable, making it a promising and suitable solution for federated learning.

(2 min) Ongoing traffic changes, including those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, reveal the necessity to adapt our public transport systems to the ever-changing users' needs. This work shows that single and multi objective stances can be synergistically combined to better answer the transit network design problem (TNDP). Single objective formulations are dynamically inferred from the rating of networks in the approximated (multi-objective) Pareto Front, where a regression approach is used to infer the optimal weights of transfer needs, times, distances, coverage, and costs. As a guiding case study, the solution is applied to the multimodal public transport network in the city of Lisbon, Portugal. The system takes individual trip data given by smartcard validations at CARRIS buses and METRO subway stations and uses them to estimate the origin-destination demand in the city. Then, Genetic Algorithms are used, considering both single and multi objective approaches, to redesign the bus network that better fits the observed traffic demand. The proposed TNDP optimization proved to improve results, with reductions in objective functions of up to 28.3%. The system managed to extensively reduce the number of routes, and all passenger related objectives, including travel time and transfers per trip, significantly improve. Grounded on automated fare collection data, the system can incrementally redesign the bus network to dynamically handle ongoing changes to the city traffic.

(2 min) We benchmark the current existing methods to jointly learn non-Cartesian k-space trajectory and reconstruction: PILOT, BJORK, and compare them with those obtained from the recently developed generalized hybrid learning (HybLearn) framework. We present the advantages of using projected gradient descent to enforce MR scanner hardware constraints as compared to using added penalties in the cost function. Further, we use the novel HybLearn scheme to jointly learn and compare our results through a retrospective study on fastMRI validation dataset.

(2 min) Building predictive models for companies often relies on inference using historical data of companies in the same industry sector. However, companies are similar across a variety of dimensions that should be leveraged in relevant prediction problems. This is particularly true for large, complex organizations which may not be well defined by a single industry and have no clear peers. To enable prediction using company information across a variety of dimensions, we create an embedding of company stocks, Stock2Vec, which can be easily added to any prediction model that applies to companies with associated stock prices. We describe the process of creating this rich vector representation from stock price fluctuations, and characterize what the dimensions represent. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate this embedding in applied machine learning problems in various business contexts. Our experiment results demonstrate that the four features in the Stock2Vec embedding can readily augment existing cross-company models and enhance cross-company predictions.

(2 min) Transformer-based models achieve great performance on Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, when we evaluate them on systematic generalization, i.e., handling novel combinations of known concepts, their performance degrades. Neural Module Networks (NMNs) are a promising approach for systematic generalization that consists on composing modules, i.e., neural networks that tackle a sub-task. Inspired by Transformers and NMNs, we propose Transformer Module Network (TMN), a novel Transformer-based model for VQA that dynamically composes modules into a question-specific Transformer network. TMNs achieve state-of-the-art systematic generalization performance in three VQA datasets, namely, CLEVR-CoGenT, CLOSURE and GQA-SGL, in some cases improving more than 30% over standard Transformers.

(2 min) We propose to identify directions invariant to a given classifier so that these directions can be controlled in tasks such as style transfer. While orthogonal decomposition is directly identifiable when the given classifier is linear, we formally define a notion of orthogonality in the non-linear case. We also provide a surprisingly simple method for constructing the orthogonal classifier (a classifier utilizing directions other than those of the given classifier). Empirically, we present three use cases where controlling orthogonal variation is important: style transfer, domain adaptation, and fairness. The orthogonal classifier enables desired style transfer when domains vary in multiple aspects, improves domain adaptation with label shifts and mitigates the unfairness as a predictor. The code is available at this http URL

(2 min) We propose a novel framework for learning linear time-invariant (LTI) models for a class of continuous-time non-autonomous nonlinear dynamics based on a representation of Koopman operators. In general, the operator is infinite-dimensional but, crucially, linear. To utilize it for efficient LTI control, we learn a finite representation of the Koopman operator that is linear in controls while concurrently learning meaningful lifting coordinates. For the latter, we rely on KoopmanizingFlows - a diffeomorphism-based representation of Koopman operators. With such a learned model, we can replace the nonlinear infinite-horizon optimal control problem with quadratic costs to that of a linear quadratic regulator (LQR), facilitating efficacious optimal control for nonlinear systems. The prediction and control efficacy of the proposed method is verified on simulation examples.

(2 min) Graph-based semi-supervised learning, which can exploit the connectivity relationship between labeled and unlabeled data, has been shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in many artificial intelligence applications. One of the most challenging problems for graph-based semi-supervised node classification is how to use the implicit information among various data to improve the performance of classifying. Traditional studies on graph-based semi-supervised learning have focused on the pairwise connections among data. However, the data correlation in real applications could be beyond pairwise and more complicated. The density information has been demonstrated to be an important clue, but it is rarely explored in depth among existing graph-based semi-supervised node classification methods. To develop a flexible and effective model for graph-based semi-supervised node classification, we propose a novel Density-Aware Hyper-Graph Neural Networks (DA-HGNN). In our proposed approach, hyper-graph is provided to explore the high-order semantic correlation among data, and a density-aware hyper-graph attention network is presented to explore the high-order connection relationship. Extensive experiments are conducted in various benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

(2 min) Weighted twin support vector machines (WLTSVM) mines as much potential similarity information in samples as possible to improve the common short-coming of non-parallel plane classifiers. Compared with twin support vector machines (TWSVM), it reduces the time complexity by deleting the superfluous constraints using the inter-class K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). Multi-view learning (MVL) is a newly developing direction of machine learning, which focuses on learning acquiring information from the data indicated by multiple feature sets. In this paper, we propose multi-view learning with privileged weighted twin support vector machines (MPWTSVM). It not only inherits the advantages of WLTSVM but also has its characteristics. Firstly, it enhances generalization ability by mining intra-class information from the same perspective. Secondly, it reduces the redundancy constraints with the help of inter-class information, thus improving the running speed. Most importantly, it can follow both the consensus and the complementarity principle simultaneously as a multi-view classification model. The consensus principle is realized by minimizing the coupling items of the two views in the original objective function. The complementary principle is achieved by establishing privileged information paradigms and MVL. A standard quadratic programming solver is used to solve the problem. Compared with multi-view classification models such as SVM-2K, MVTSVM, MCPK, and PSVM-2V, our model has better accuracy and classification efficiency. Experimental results on 45 binary data sets prove the effectiveness of our method.

(2 min) From the point of view of the human brain, continual learning can perform various tasks without mutual interference. An effective way to reduce mutual interference can be found in sparsity and selectivity of neurons. According to Aljundi et al. and Hadsell et al., imposing sparsity at the representational level is advantageous for continual learning because sparse neuronal activations encourage less overlap between parameters, resulting in less interference. Similarly, highly selective neural networks are likely to induce less interference since particular response in neurons will reduce the chance of overlap with other parameters. Considering that the human brain performs continual learning over the lifespan, finding conditions where sparsity and selectivity naturally arises may provide insight for understanding how the brain functions. This paper investigates various conditions that naturally increase sparsity and selectivity in a neural network. This paper tested different optimizers with Hoyer's sparsity metric and CCMAS selectivity metric in MNIST classification task. It is essential to note that investigations on the natural occurrence of sparsity and selectivity concerning various conditions have not been acknowledged in any sector of neuroscience nor machine learning until this day. This paper found that particular conditions increase sparsity and selectivity such as applying a large learning rate and lowering a batch size. In addition to the relationship between the condition, sparsity, and selectivity, the following will be discussed based on empirical analysis: 1. The relationship between sparsity and selectivity and 2. The relationship between test accuracy, sparsity, and selectivity.

(2 min) Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to heterogeneously distributed data, since a common global model in FL may not adapt to the heterogeneous data distribution of each user. To counter this issue, personalized FL (PFL) was proposed to produce dedicated local models for each individual user. However, PFL is far from its maturity, because existing PFL solutions either demonstrate unsatisfactory generalization towards different model architectures or cost enormous extra computation and memory. In this work, we propose federated learning with personalized sparse mask (FedSpa), a novel PFL scheme that employs personalized sparse masks to customize sparse local models on the edge. Instead of training an intact (or dense) PFL model, FedSpa only maintains a fixed number of active parameters throughout training (aka sparse-to-sparse training), which enables users' models to achieve personalization with cheap communication, computation, and memory cost. We theoretically show that the iterates obtained by FedSpa converge to the local minimizer of the formulated SPFL problem at rate of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{T}})$. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FedSpa significantly saves communication and computation costs, while simultaneously achieves higher model accuracy and faster convergence speed against several state-of-the-art PFL methods.

(2 min) In this work, a novel stack of well-known technologies is presented to determine an automatic method to segment the heart sounds in a phonocardiogram (PCG). We will show a deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) capable of segmenting a PCG into its main components and a very specific way of extracting instantaneous frequency that will play an important role in the training and testing of the proposed model. More specifically, it involves a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network accompanied by the Fourier Synchrosqueezed Transform (FSST) used to extract instantaneous time-frequency features from a PCG. The present approach was tested on heart sound signals longer than 5 seconds and shorter than 35 seconds from freely-available databases. This approach proved that, with a relatively small architecture, a small set of data, and the right features, this method achieved an almost state-of-the-art performance, showing an average sensitivity of 89.5%, an average positive predictive value of 89.3\% and an average accuracy of 91.3%.

(2 min) General real-time runway occupancy time prediction modelling for multiple airports is a current research gap. An attempt to generalize a real-time prediction model for Arrival Runway Occupancy Time (AROT) is presented in this paper by substituting categorical features by their numerical equivalences. Three days of data, collected from Saab Sensis' Aerobahn system at three US airports, has been used for this work. Three tree-based machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree, Random Forest and Gradient Boosting are used to assess the generalizability of the model using numerical equivalent features. We have shown that the model trained on numerical equivalent features not only have performances at least on par with models trained on categorical features but also can make predictions on unseen data from other airports.

(2 min) Iterative distributed optimization algorithms involve multiple agents that communicate with each other, over time, in order to minimize/maximize a global objective. In the presence of unreliable communication networks, the Age-of-Information (AoI), which measures the freshness of data received, may be large and hence hinder algorithmic convergence. In this paper, we study the convergence of general distributed gradient-based optimization algorithms in the presence of communication that neither happens periodically nor at stochastically independent points in time. We show that convergence is guaranteed provided the random variables associated with the AoI processes are stochastically dominated by a random variable with finite first moment. This improves on previous requirements of boundedness of more than the first moment. We then introduce stochastically strongly connected (SSC) networks, a new stochastic form of strong connectedness for time-varying networks. We show: If for any $p \ge0$ the processes that describe the success of communication between agents in a SSC network are $\alpha$-mixing with $n^{p-1}\alpha(n)$ summable, then the associated AoI processes are stochastically dominated by a random variable with finite $p$-th moment. In combination with our first contribution, this implies that distributed stochastic gradient descend converges in the presence of AoI, if $\alpha(n)$ is summable.

(2 min) As machine learning becomes more widely adopted across domains, it is critical that researchers and ML engineers think about the inherent biases in the data that may be perpetuated by the model. Recently, many studies have shown that such biases are also imbibed in Graph Neural Network (GNN) models if the input graph is biased. In this work, we aim to mitigate the bias learned by GNNs through modifying the input graph. To that end, we propose FairMod, a Fair Graph Modification methodology with three formulations: the Global Fairness Optimization (GFO), Community Fairness Optimization (CFO), and Fair Edge Weighting (FEW) models. Our proposed models perform either microscopic or macroscopic edits to the input graph while training GNNs and learn node embeddings that are both accurate and fair under the context of link recommendations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on four real world datasets and show that we can improve the recommendation fairness by several factors at negligible cost to link prediction accuracy.

(2 min) The optical fiber multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) per spatial path is treated. The spatial dimensions represent the multiple modes employed for transmission and the cross-talk between them originates in the multiplexers and demultiplexers, which are polarization dependent and thus timevarying. The upper bounds from free-space IM/DD MIMO channels are adapted to the fiber case, and the constellation constrained capacity is constructively estimated using the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm. An autoencoder is then proposed to optimize a practical MIMO transmission in terms of pre-coder and detector assuming channel distribution knowledge at the transmitter. The pre-coders are shown to be robust to changes in the channel.

(2 min) In structured prediction, the goal is to jointly predict many output variables that together encode a structured object -- a path in a graph, an entity-relation triple, or an ordering of objects. Such a large output space makes learning hard and requires vast amounts of labeled data. Different approaches leverage alternate sources of supervision. One approach -- entropy regularization -- posits that decision boundaries should lie in low-probability regions. It extracts supervision from unlabeled examples, but remains agnostic to the structure of the output space. Conversely, neuro-symbolic approaches exploit the knowledge that not every prediction corresponds to a valid structure in the output space. Yet, they does not further restrict the learned output distribution. This paper introduces a framework that unifies both approaches. We propose a loss, neuro-symbolic entropy regularization, that encourages the model to confidently predict a valid object. It is obtained by restricting entropy regularization to the distribution over only valid structures. This loss is efficiently computed when the output constraint is expressed as a tractable logic circuit. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with other neuro-symbolic losses that eliminate invalid predictions. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a series of semi-supervised and fully-supervised structured-prediction experiments, where we find that it leads to models whose predictions are more accurate and more likely to be valid.

(2 min) Large pre-trained language models have been used to generate code,providing a flexible interface for synthesizing programs from natural language specifications. However, they often violate syntactic and semantic rules of their output language, limiting their practical usability. In this paper, we propose Synchromesh: a framework for substantially improving the reliability of pre-trained models for code generation. Synchromesh comprises two components. First, it retrieves few-shot examples from a training bank using Target Similarity Tuning (TST), a novel method for semantic example selection. TST learns to recognize utterances that describe similar target programs despite differences in surface natural language features. Then, Synchromesh feeds the examples to a pre-trained language model and samples programs using Constrained Semantic Decoding (CSD): a general framework for constraining the output to a set of valid programs in the target language. CSD leverages constraints on partial outputs to sample complete correct programs, and needs neither re-training nor fine-tuning of the language model. We evaluate our methods by synthesizing code from natural language descriptions using GPT-3 and Codex in three real-world languages: SQL queries, Vega-Lite visualizations and SMCalFlow programs. These domains showcase rich constraints that CSD is able to enforce, including syntax, scope, typing rules, and contextual logic. We observe substantial complementary gains from CSD and TST in prediction accuracy and in effectively preventing run-time errors.

(2 min) The human hippocampus possesses "concept cells", neurons that fire when presented with stimuli belonging to a specific concept, regardless of the modality. Recently, similar concept cells were discovered in a multimodal network called CLIP (Radford et at., 2021). Here, we ask whether CLIP can explain the fMRI activity of the human hippocampus better than a purely visual (or linguistic) model. We extend our analysis to a range of publicly available uni- and multi-modal models. We demonstrate that "multimodality" stands out as a key component when assessing the ability of a network to explain the multivoxel activity in the hippocampus.

(2 min) Post-translational modifications (PTMs) in proteins occur after the process of translation. PTMs account for many cellular processes such as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) repair, cell signaling and cell death. One of the recent PTMs is succinylation. Succinylation modifies lysine residue from $-1$ to $+1$. Locating succinylation sites using experimental methods, such as mass spectrometry is very laborious. Hence, computational methods are favored using machine learning techniques. This paper proposes a deep learning architecture to predict succinylation sites. The performance of the proposed architecture is compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning architecture and other traditional machine learning techniques for succinylation. It is shown from the performance metrics that the proposed architecture provides a good trade-off between speed of computation and classification accuracy.

(2 min) Protected attributes are often presented as categorical features that need to be encoded before feeding them into a machine learning algorithm. Encoding these attributes is paramount as they determine the way the algorithm will learn from the data. Categorical feature encoding has a direct impact on the model performance and fairness. In this work, we compare the accuracy and fairness implications of the two most well-known encoders: one-hot encoding and target encoding. We distinguish between two types of induced bias that can arise while using these encodings and can lead to unfair models. The first type, irreducible bias, is due to direct group category discrimination and a second type, reducible bias, is due to large variance in less statistically represented groups. We take a deeper look into how regularization methods for target encoding can improve the induced bias while encoding categorical features. Furthermore, we tackle the problem of intersectional fairness that arises when mixing two protected categorical features leading to higher cardinality. This practice is a powerful feature engineering technique used for boosting model performance. We study its implications on fairness as it can increase both types of induced bias

(2 min) Entity alignment aims at integrating heterogeneous knowledge from different knowledge graphs. Recent studies employ embedding-based methods by first learning the representation of Knowledge Graphs and then performing entity alignment via measuring the similarity between entity embeddings. However, they failed to make good use of the relation semantic information due to the trade-off problem caused by the different objectives of learning knowledge embedding and neighborhood consensus. To address this problem, we propose Relational Knowledge Distillation for Entity Alignment (RKDEA), a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based model equipped with knowledge distillation for entity alignment. We adopt GCN-based models to learn the representation of entities by considering the graph structure and incorporating the relation semantic information into GCN via knowledge distillation. Then, we introduce a novel adaptive mechanism to transfer relational knowledge so as to jointly learn entity embedding and neighborhood consensus. Experimental results on several benchmarking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

(2 min) With the rapid expansion of urban areas and the increasingly use of electricity, the need for locating buried cables is becoming urgent. In this paper, a noval method to locate underground cables based on Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Gaussian-process regression is proposed. Firstly, the coordinate system of the detected area is conducted, and the input and output of locating buried cables are determined. The GPR is moved along the established parallel detection lines, and the hyperbolic signatures generated by buried cables are identified and fitted, thus the positions and depths of some points on the cable could be derived. On the basis of the established coordinate system and the derived points on the cable, the clustering method and cable fitting algorithm based on Gaussian-process regression are proposed to find the most likely locations of the underground cables. Furthermore, the confidence intervals of the cable's locations are also obtained. Both the position and depth noises are taken into account in our method, ensuring the robustness and feasibility in different environments and equipments. Experiments on real-world datasets are conducted, and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

(2 min) We introduce an ensemble of artificial intelligence models for gravitational wave detection that we trained in the Summit supercomputer using 32 nodes, equivalent to 192 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, within 2 hours. Once fully trained, we optimized these models for accelerated inference using NVIDIA TensorRT. We deployed our inference-optimized AI ensemble in the ThetaGPU supercomputer at Argonne Leadership Computer Facility to conduct distributed inference. Using the entire ThetaGPU supercomputer, consisting of 20 nodes each of which has 8 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 2 AMD Rome CPUs, our NVIDIA TensorRT-optimized AI ensemble porcessed an entire month of advanced LIGO data (including Hanford and Livingston data streams) within 50 seconds. Our inference-optimized AI ensemble retains the same sensitivity of traditional AI models, namely, it identifies all known binary black hole mergers previously identified in this advanced LIGO dataset and reports no misclassifications, while also providing a 3X inference speedup compared to traditional artificial intelligence models. We used time slides to quantify the performance of our AI ensemble to process up to 5 years worth of advanced LIGO data. In this synthetically enhanced dataset, our AI ensemble reports an average of one misclassification for every month of searched advanced LIGO data. We also present the receiver operating characteristic curve of our AI ensemble using this 5 year long advanced LIGO dataset. This approach provides the required tools to conduct accelerated, AI-driven gravitational wave detection at scale.

(2 min) We study the federated optimization problem from a dual perspective and propose a new algorithm termed federated dual coordinate descent (FedDCD), which is based on a type of coordinate descent method developed by Necora et al. [Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 2017]. Additionally, we enhance the FedDCD method with inexact gradient oracles and Nesterov's acceleration. We demonstrate theoretically that our proposed approach achieves better convergence rates than the state-of-the-art primal federated optimization algorithms under mild conditions. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets support our analysis.

(2 min) The prediction of energetically stable crystal structures formed by a given chemical composition is a central problem in solid-state physics. In principle, the crystalline state of assembled atoms can be determined by optimizing the energy surface, which in turn can be evaluated using first-principles calculations. However, performing the iterative gradient descent on the potential energy surface using first-principles calculations is prohibitively expensive for complex systems, such as those with many atoms per unit cell. Here, we present a unique methodology for crystal structure prediction (CSP) that relies on a machine learning algorithm called metric learning. It is shown that a binary classifier, trained on a large number of already identified crystal structures, can determine the isomorphism of crystal structures formed by two given chemical compositions with an accuracy of approximately 96.4\%. For a given query composition with an unknown crystal structure, the model is used to automatically select from a crystal structure database a set of template crystals with nearly identical stable structures to which element substitution is to be applied. Apart from the local relaxation calculation of the identified templates, the proposed method does not use ab initio calculations. The potential of this substation-based CSP is demonstrated for a wide variety of crystal systems.

(2 min) Computer Vision (CV) classifiers which distinguish and detect nonverbal social human behavior and mental state can aid digital diagnostics and therapeutics for psychiatry and the behavioral sciences. While CV classifiers for traditional and structured classification tasks can be developed with standard machine learning pipelines for supervised learning consisting of data labeling, preprocessing, and training a convolutional neural network, there are several pain points which arise when attempting this process for behavioral phenotyping. Here, we discuss the challenges and corresponding opportunities in this space, including handling heterogeneous data, avoiding biased models, labeling massive and repetitive data sets, working with ambiguous or compound class labels, managing privacy concerns, creating appropriate representations, and personalizing models. We discuss current state-of-the-art research endeavors in CV such as data curation, data augmentation, crowdsourced labeling, active learning, reinforcement learning, generative models, representation learning, federated learning, and meta-learning. We highlight at least some of the machine learning advancements needed for imaging classifiers to detect human social cues successfully and reliably.

(2 min) Dataflow/mapping decides the compute and energy efficiency of DNN accelerators. Many mappers have been proposed to tackle the intra-layer map-space. However, mappers for inter-layer map-space (aka layer-fusion map-space), have been rarely discussed. In this work, we propose a mapper, DNNFuser, specifically focusing on this layer-fusion map-space. While existing SOTA DNN mapping explorations rely on search-based mappers, this is the first work, to the best of our knowledge, to propose a one-shot inference-based mapper. We leverage a famous language model GPT as our DNN architecture to learn layer-fusion optimization as a sequence modeling problem. Further, the trained DNNFuser can generalize its knowledge and infer new solutions for unseen conditions. Within one inference pass, DNNFuser can infer solutions with compatible performance to the ones found by a highly optimized search-based mapper while being 66x-127x faster.

(2 min) Reinforcement learning (RL) applications, where an agent can simply learn optimal behaviors by interacting with the environment, are quickly gaining tremendous success in a wide variety of applications from controlling simple pendulums to complex data centers. However, setting the right hyperparameters can have a huge impact on the deployed solution performance and reliability in the inference models, produced via RL, used for decision-making. Hyperparameter search itself is a laborious process that requires many iterations and computationally expensive to find the best settings that produce the best neural network architectures. In comparison to other neural network architectures, deep RL has not witnessed much hyperparameter tuning, due to its algorithm complexity and simulation platforms needed. In this paper, we propose a distributed variable-length genetic algorithm framework to systematically tune hyperparameters for various RL applications, improving training time and robustness of the architecture, via evolution. We demonstrate the scalability of our approach on many RL problems (from simple gyms to complex applications) and compared with Bayesian approach. Our results show that with more generations, optimal solutions that require fewer training episodes and are computationally cheap while being more robust for deployment. Our results are imperative to advance deep reinforcement learning controllers for real-world problems.

(2 min) The Linear Threshold Model is a widely used model that describes how information diffuses through a social network. According to this model, an individual adopts an idea or product after the proportion of their neighbors who have adopted it reaches a certain threshold. Typical applications of the Linear Threshold Model assume that thresholds are either the same for all network nodes or randomly distributed, even though some people may be more susceptible to peer pressure than others. To address individual-level differences, we propose causal inference methods for estimating individual thresholds that can more accurately predict whether and when individuals will be affected by their peers. We introduce the concept of heterogeneous peer effects and develop a Structural Causal Model which corresponds to the Linear Threshold Model and supports heterogeneous peer effect identification and estimation. We develop two algorithms for individual threshold estimation, one based on causal trees and one based on causal meta-learners. Our experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our proposed models can better predict individual-level thresholds in the Linear Threshold Model and thus more precisely predict which nodes will get activated over time.

(2 min) Given a sequence of random (directed and weighted) graphs, we address the problem of online monitoring and detection of changes in the underlying data distribution. Our idea is to endow sequential change-point detection (CPD) techniques with a graph representation learning substrate based on the versatile Random Dot Product Graph (RDPG) model. We consider efficient, online updates of a judicious monitoring function, which quantifies the discrepancy between the streaming graph observations and the nominal RDPG. This reference distribution is inferred via spectral embeddings of the first few graphs in the sequence. We characterize the distribution of this running statistic to select thresholds that guarantee error-rate control, and under simplifying approximations we offer insights on the algorithm's detection resolution and delay. The end result is a lightweight online CPD algorithm, that is also explainable by virtue of the well-appreciated interpretability of RDPG embeddings. This is in stark contrast with most existing graph CPD approaches, which either rely on extensive computation, or they store and process the entire observed time series. An apparent limitation of the RDPG model is its suitability for undirected and unweighted graphs only, a gap we aim to close here to broaden the scope of the CPD framework. Unlike previous proposals, our non-parametric RDPG model for weighted graphs does not require a priori specification of the weights' distribution to perform inference and estimation. This network modeling contribution is of independent interest beyond CPD. We offer an open-source implementation of the novel online CPD algorithm for weighted and direct graphs, whose effectiveness and efficiency are demonstrated via (reproducible) synthetic and real network data experiments.

(2 min) We propose a new structured pruning framework for compressing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with skip connections, based on measuring the statistical dependency of hidden layers and predicted outputs. The dependence measure defined by the energy statistics of hidden layers serves as a model-free measure of information between the feature maps and the output of the network. The estimated dependence measure is subsequently used to prune a collection of redundant and uninformative layers. Model-freeness of our measure guarantees that no parametric assumptions on the feature map distribution are required, making it computationally appealing for very high dimensional feature space in DNNs. Extensive numerical experiments on various architectures show the efficacy of the proposed pruning approach with competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods.

(2 min) Subgraph matching is a fundamental problem in various fields that use graph structured data. Subgraph matching algorithms enumerate all isomorphic embeddings of a query graph q in a data graph G. An important branch of matching algorithms exploit the backtracking search approach which recursively extends intermediate results following a matching order of query vertices. It has been shown that the matching order plays a critical role in time efficiency of these backtracking based subgraph matching algorithms. In recent years, many advanced techniques for query vertex ordering (i.e., matching order generation) have been proposed to reduce the unpromising intermediate results according to the preset heuristic rules. In this paper, for the first time we apply the Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) techniques to generate the high-quality matching order for subgraph matching algorithms. Instead of using the fixed heuristics to generate the matching order, our model could capture and make full use of the graph information, and thus determine the query vertex order with the adaptive learning-based rule that could significantly reduces the number of redundant enumerations. With the help of the reinforcement learning framework, our model is able to consider the long-term benefits rather than only consider the local information at current ordering step.Extensive experiments on six real-life data graphs demonstrate that our proposed matching order generation technique could reduce up to two orders of magnitude of query processing time compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

(2 min) We introduce a novel framework for optimization based on energy-conserving Hamiltonian dynamics in a strongly mixing (chaotic) regime and establish its key properties analytically and numerically. The prototype is a discretization of Born-Infeld dynamics, with a squared relativistic speed limit depending on the objective function. This class of frictionless, energy-conserving optimizers proceeds unobstructed until slowing naturally near the minimal loss, which dominates the phase space volume of the system. Building from studies of chaotic systems such as dynamical billiards, we formulate a specific algorithm with good performance on machine learning and PDE-solving tasks, including generalization. It cannot stop at a high local minimum and cannot overshoot the global minimum, yielding an advantage in non-convex loss functions, and proceeds faster than GD+momentum in shallow valleys.

(2 min) Monitoring and understanding affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements of ubiquitous wearable technologies have increased the reliability of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (e.g., mood, stress, etc.), offering comprehensive and continuous monitoring of individuals over time. Previous attempts to model an individual's mental state were limited to subjective approaches or the inclusion of only a few modalities (i.e., phone, watch). Thus, the goal of our study was to investigate the capacity to more accurately predict affect through a fully automatic and objective approach using multiple commercial devices. Longitudinal physiological data and daily assessments of emotions were collected from a sample of college students using smart wearables and phones for over a year. Results showed that our model was able to predict next-day affect with accuracy comparable to state of the art methods.

(2 min) Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative rewards. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative rewards. We parameterize the policy controlling actions by neural networks and propose a novel policy gradient algorithm called Quantile-Based Policy Optimization (QPO) and its variant Quantile-Based Proximal Policy Optimization (QPPO) to solve deep RL problems with quantile objectives. QPO uses two coupled iterations running at different time scales for simultaneously estimating quantiles and policy parameters and is shown to converge to the global optimal policy under certain conditions. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform the existing baseline algorithms under the quantile criterion.

(2 min) A range of applications for automatic machine learning need the generation process to be controllable. In this work, we propose a way to control the output via a sequence of simple actions, that are called semantic code classes. Finally, we present a semantic code classification task and discuss methods for solving this problem on the Natural Language to Machine Learning (NL2ML) dataset.

(2 min) Learning from multiple related tasks by knowledge sharing and transfer has become increasingly relevant over the last two decades. In order to successfully transfer information from one task to another, it is critical to understand the similarities and differences between the domains. In this paper, we introduce the notion of \emph{performance gap}, an intuitive and novel measure of the distance between learning tasks. Unlike existing measures which are used as tools to bound the difference of expected risks between tasks (e.g., $\mathcal{H}$-divergence or discrepancy distance), we theoretically show that the performance gap can be viewed as a data- and algorithm-dependent regularizer, which controls the model complexity and leads to finer guarantees. More importantly, it also provides new insights and motivates a novel principle for designing strategies for knowledge sharing and transfer: gap minimization. We instantiate this principle with two algorithms: 1. {gapBoost}, a novel and principled boosting algorithm that explicitly minimizes the performance gap between source and target domains for transfer learning; and 2. {gapMTNN}, a representation learning algorithm that reformulates gap minimization as semantic conditional matching for multitask learning. Our extensive evaluation on both transfer learning and multitask learning benchmark data sets shows that our methods outperform existing baselines.

(2 min) Attention based explanations (viz. saliency maps), by providing interpretability to black box models such as deep neural networks, are assumed to improve human trust and reliance in the underlying models. Recently, it has been shown that attention weights are frequently uncorrelated with gradient-based measures of feature importance. Motivated by this, we ask a follow-up question: "Assuming that we only consider the tasks where attention weights correlate well with feature importance, how effective are these attention based explanations in increasing human trust and reliance in the underlying models?". In other words, can we use attention as an explanation? We perform extensive human study experiments that aim to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the degree to which attention based explanations are suitable in increasing human trust and reliance. Our experiment results show that attention cannot be used as an explanation.

(2 min) While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) achieve spectacular results on unstructured data like images, there is still a gap on tabular data, data for which state of the art supervised learning still favours to a large extent decision tree (DT)-based models. This paper proposes a new path forward for the generation of tabular data, exploiting decades-old understanding of the supervised task's best components for DT induction, from losses (properness), models (tree-based) to algorithms (boosting). The \textit{properness} condition on the supervised loss -- which postulates the optimality of Bayes rule -- leads us to a variational GAN-style loss formulation which is \textit{tight} when discriminators meet a calibration property trivially satisfied by DTs, and, under common assumptions about the supervised loss, yields "one loss to train against them all" for the generator: the $\chi^2$. We then introduce tree-based generative models, \textit{generative trees} (GTs), meant to mirror on the generative side the good properties of DTs for classifying tabular data, with a boosting-compliant \textit{adversarial} training algorithm for GTs. We also introduce \textit{copycat training}, in which the generator copies at run time the underlying tree (graph) of the discriminator DT and completes it for the hardest discriminative task, with boosting compliant convergence. We test our algorithms on tasks including fake/real distinction, training from fake data and missing data imputation. Each one of these tasks displays that GTs can provide comparatively simple -- and interpretable -- contenders to sophisticated state of the art methods for data generation (using neural network models) or missing data imputation (relying on multiple imputation by chained equations with complex tree-based modeling).

(2 min) As one of the most fundamental stochastic optimization algorithms, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been intensively developed and extensively applied in machine learning in the past decade. There have been some modified SGD-type algorithms, which outperform the SGD in many competitions and applications in terms of convergence rate and accuracy, such as momentum-based SGD (mSGD) and adaptive gradient algorithm (AdaGrad). Despite these empirical successes, the theoretical properties of these algorithms have not been well established due to technical difficulties. With this motivation, we focus on convergence analysis of mSGD and AdaGrad for any smooth (possibly non-convex) loss functions in stochastic optimization. First, we prove that the iterates of mSGD are asymptotically convergent to a connected set of stationary points with probability one, which is more general than existing works on subsequence convergence or convergence of time averages. Moreover, we prove that the loss function of mSGD decays at a certain rate faster than that of SGD. In addition, we prove the iterates of AdaGrad are asymptotically convergent to a connected set of stationary points with probability one. Also, this result extends the results from the literature on subsequence convergence and the convergence of time averages. Despite the generality of the above convergence results, we have relaxed some assumptions of gradient noises, convexity of loss functions, as well as boundedness of iterates.

(2 min) Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after exploring. In the the tabular setting, it is well known that this is a more difficult problem than PAC RL -- where the agent has access to the reward function during exploration -- with optimal sample complexities in the two settings differing by a factor of $|\mathcal{S}|$, the size of the state space. We show that this separation does not exist in the setting of linear MDPs. We first develop a computationally efficient algorithm for reward-free RL in a $d$-dimensional linear MDP with sample complexity scaling as $\mathcal{O}(d^2/\epsilon^2)$. We then show a matching lower bound of $\Omega(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ on PAC RL. To our knowledge, our approach is the first computationally efficient algorithm to achieve optimal $d$ dependence in linear MDPs, even in the single-reward PAC setting. Our algorithm relies on a novel procedure which efficiently traverses a linear MDP, collecting samples in any given "feature direction", and enjoys a sample complexity scaling optimally in the (linear MDP equivalent of the) maximal state visitation probability. We show that this exploration procedure can also be applied to solve the problem of obtaining "well-conditioned" covariates in linear MDPs.

(2 min) Developing a suitable Deep Neural Network (DNN) often requires significant iteration, where different model versions are evaluated and compared. While metrics such as accuracy are a powerful means to succinctly describe a model's performance across a dataset or to directly compare model versions, practitioners often wish to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that influence a model's predictions. Interpretability techniques such as gradient-based methods and local approximations can be used to examine small sets of inputs in fine detail, but it can be hard to determine if results from small sets generalize across a dataset. We introduce IMACS, a method that combines gradient-based model attributions with aggregation and visualization techniques to summarize differences in attributions between two DNN image models. More specifically, IMACS extracts salient input features from an evaluation dataset, clusters them based on similarity, then visualizes differences in model attributions for similar input features. In this work, we introduce a framework for aggregating, summarizing, and comparing the attribution information for two models across a dataset; present visualizations that highlight differences between 2 image classification models; and show how our technique can uncover behavioral differences caused by domain shift between two models trained on satellite images.